In this important volume, Graziella Parati examines the ways in which Italian women writers articulate their identities through autobiography - a public act that is also the creation of a private life. Considering autobiographical writings by five women writers from the seventeenth century to the present, Parati draws important connections between self-writing and the debate over women's roles, both traditional and transgressive. Parati considers the first prose autobiography written by an Italian woman - Camilla Faa Gonzaga's 1622 memoir - as her beginning point, citing it as a central "pre-text". Parati then examines the autobiographies of Enif Robert, Fausta Cialente, Rita Levi Montalcini, and Luisa Passerini. Through her discussion of these women's writings, she demonstrates the complex negotiations over identity contained within them, negotiations that challenge dichotomies between male and female, maternal and paternal, and private and public. Public History, Private Stories is a compelling exploration of the disparate identities created by these women through the act of writing autobiography.

When public history was imported from the United States to China around the turn of the twenty-first century, it was introduced as a sub-field within history, and has developed along that path ever since. Professional historians in China, even some forward-looking ones, see public history as merely presenting a change in the patterns of participation in history-making. This book offers a sharply different view. It contends, essentially, that public history represents more than a research domain within history or within any existing discipline, nor does it fit into any established narratives, but rather, a fundamental change of the entire process of history-making in China. In this process, the public is prosuming history. Public history makes obsolete the old structure for building and acquiring historical knowledge: it challenges the old assumptions, supersedes the rigid academic hierarchy, and stirs the imaginations of the multitudes. With an assemblage of case studies, this work makes a case for a system view of public history making, or public history(ing), and launches a concept, complex public history, i.e. public history(ing) as complex adaptive systems.

How do schools and public history influence each other? Cases studies focusing on school and public history around the world shed light on the intricate relationships between schools, students, teachers, policy makers and public historians. From why Robben Island is not included in South African curriculum to how German schools shape Holocaust memory, the case studies offered in this book sheds light on a current topic.

Private Lives, Public Histories brings together diverse methods from archaeology and cultural anthropology, enabling us to glean rare information on private lives from the historical record. The chapters span geographic areas to present recent ethnohistorical research that advances our knowledge of the connections between the public and private domains and the significance of these connections for understanding the past as a lived experience, both historically and in a contemporary sense. We discuss how the use of different sources—e.g., public records, personal journals, material culture, the built environment, letters, public performances, etc.—can reveal different types of information about past cultural contexts, as well as private sentiments about official culture and society. Through an exploration of sites as varied as homes, factories, plantations, markets, and tourism attractions we address the public significance of private sentiments, the resilience of bodies, and gendered interactions in historical contexts. In doing so, this book highlights linkages between private lives and public settings that have allowed people to continue to exist within, adapt to, and/or resist dominant cultural narratives.

Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography? Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust. An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.

Professional historians, schools, colleges and universities are not alone in shaping higher-order understanding of history. The central thesis of this book is the belief historical fiction in text and film shape attitudes towards an understanding of history as it moves the focus from slavery to the enslaved—from the institution to the personal, families and feminist accounts. In a broader sense, this contributes to a public history. In part, using the quickly growing corpus of neo-slave counterfactual narratives, this book examines the notion of the emerging slavery public history, and the extent to which this is defined by literature, film and other forms of artistic expression, rather than non-fiction—popular or scholarly—and education in history in the school systems. Inter alia, this book looks to the validity of historical fiction in print or in film as a way of understanding history. A focal point of this book is the hypothesis that neo-slave narratives—supported by selective triangulated readings and viewings of scholarly works and non-fiction—have assisted greatly in re-shaping the historiography of antebellum slavery, and scholarly historians followed in the wake of these developments. Essentially, this has meant a re-shaping of the historiography with a focus from slavery to that of the enslaved. Moreover, it has opened new vistas for a public history, devoid of top-down authoritative scholarship. An important and provocative read for students and scholars interested in understanding the history of slavery, its harrowing effects and how it was culturally defined.

This volume centers on theories and methodologies for postgraduate feminist researchers engaged in interdisciplinary research. In the context of globalization, this book gives special attention to cutting-edge approaches at the borders between humanities and social sciences and specific discipline-transgressing fields, such as feminist technoscience studies.

The essays included in this collection examine issues such as identity and ideology which are at play in the female autobiography practice, along with the problematicity that these trigger in terms of self-representation and traditional formal boundaries. The women writers analyzed here through mainly historical, literary, feminist and psychoanalytic lenses cover a long period in the history of Italy, spanning from the Fascist era to our time. In an attempt to organize and connect these texts which are chronologically far apart, we have divided our contributions into two main parts. The first, “Shapes of Ideology,” includes authors interacting primarily with political ideology in a way that eventually entails the challenge of the official “technologies of gender” (De Lauretis, 1987) and implicitly, a reflection on the gendered identity. In the second part, “Reconsidering ideology, negotiating autobiography,” while the political ideology is not completely excluded, it becomes however something more internalized and relevant to the writers’ quest for identity. Such process bears consequences with respect to the canon of autobiography, as authors experiment with new forms of autobiographical narratives and readers become more and more an integral component of this personal endeavor.

This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in digital public history. Individual studies by internationally renowned public historians, digital humanists, and digital historians elucidate central issues in the field and present a critical account of the major public history accomplishments, research activities, and practices with the public and of their digital context. The handbook applies an international and comparative approach, looks at the historical development of the field, focuses on technical background and the use of specific digital media and tools. Furthermore, the handbook analyzes connections with local communities and different publics worldwide when engaging in digital activities with the past, indicating directions for future research, and teaching activities.

A wide-ranging collection of essays centred on readings of the body in contemporary literary and socio-anthropological discourse, from slavery and rape to female genital mutilation, from clothing, ocular pornography, voice, deformation and transmutation to the imprisoned, dismembered, remembered, abducted or ghostly body, in Africa, Australasia and the Pacific, Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain and Eire