Epilogue: On the Current and Future State of Historical Writing

Author(s):  
Allan Megill

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.

Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.


How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400–1400? How was the past understood in religious, social, and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes chapters on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.


2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Ka-May Cheng

“What is historiography?” asked the American historian Carl Becker in 1938. Professional historians continue to argue over the meaning of the term. This book challenges the view of historiography as an esoteric subject by presenting an accessible and concise overview of the history of historical writing from the Renaissance to the present. Historiography plays an integral role in aiding undergraduate students to better understand the nature and purpose of historical analysis more generally by examining the many conflicting ways that historians have defined and approached history. By demonstrating how these historians have differed in both their interpretations of specific historical events and their definitions of history itself, this book conveys to students the interpretive character of history as a discipline and the way that the historian’s context and subjective perspective influence his or her understanding of the past.


This book explores the history of health care in postcolonial state-making and the fragmentation of the health system in Syria during the conflict. It analyzes the role of international humanitarian law (IHL) in enabling attacks on health facilities and distinguishes the differences between humanitarian solutions and refugee populations’ expectations. It also describes the way in which humanitarian actors have fed the war economy. The book highlights the lived experience of siege in all its layers. It examines how humanitarian actors have become part of the information wars that have raged throughout the past ten years and how they have chosen to position themselves in the face of grave violations of IHL.


2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 133-143
Author(s):  
Bolanle Adetoun ◽  
Maggie Tserere ◽  
Modupe Adewuyi ◽  
Titilola Akande ◽  
Williams Akande

How good gets better and bad gets worse: measuring the face of emotion Given the history of the past, black South African students from different settings face unique academic and emotional climate. Using the Differential Emotions Scale (DES) which focuses on ten discrete emotions, and building upon Boyle's (1984) seminal work, this study reports a repeated-measure multiple discriminant function analysis for individual items across raters. The findings further indicate that majority of the DES items are sensitive indicators of the different innate and universal facial expressions. However, the construct requires revision so that it offers the examiner maximum flexibility in assessment at diverse levels, in terms of more extensive norming and programmatic replication. In brief, the DES potentially has much to offer provided that it is adequately developed for use in non-Western nations or contexts.


Author(s):  
Antoine Borrut

Writing the history of the first centuries of Islam poses thorny methodological problems, because our knowledge rests upon narrative sources produced later in Abbasid Iraq. The creation of an “official” version of the early Islamic past (i.e., a vulgate), composed contemporarily with the consolidation of Abbasid authority in the Middle East, was not the first attempt by Muslims to write about their origins. This Abbasid-era version succeeded when previous efforts vanished, or were reshaped, in rewritings and enshrined as the “official” version of Islamic sacred history. Attempts to impose different historical orthodoxies affected the making of this version, as history was rewritten with available materials, partly determined by earlier generations of Islamic historians. This essay intends to discuss a robust culture of historical writing in eighth-century Syria and to suggest approaches to access these now-lost historiographical layers torn between memory and oblivion, through Muslim and non-Muslim sources.


2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (197) ◽  
pp. 289-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cannadine

Abstract This article traces the development of biographical and historical writing about the British monarchy from the ‘golden age’ of Elizabeth I to the House of Windsor. It examines the differences in approach over the past two centuries, in particular, from the uncritical biographies of the Victorian period to the current unregulated flood of material, authorized and unauthorized. Such an analysis goes beyond the history of dynasties and individuals and becomes a history of society as reflected in the changing experiences of the British royal family.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Antônia Rosa Almeida ◽  
João Bartolomeu Rodrigues ◽  
Levi Leonido Fernandes da Silva ◽  
Elsa Maria Gabriel Morgado

Since man is a man, history has been responsible for showing the progress of life in society and, analyzing the foundations of education, one can understand the advances and setbacks in the segments that support it. One must remember the importance and meaning of education to realize it”s contribution to people in particular and to humanity in general. For women, education is a great example of building for citizenship. Female empowerment and its entire universe overlap with the history of education, with the infinite property through the consolidation of social struggles and female resistance to what was imposed by society. The march of women made the role of education multiply in the face of more varied realities, whether in the rural environment or in the urban environment, in the most different spaces. It is known that the motivation for the search for knowledge in the circumstances in which women lived in the past was decisive for being the provocateur of women's empowerment, because it is a right for all, in the journey of the whole social force, family, religion, politics, culture, and work. In what was proposed by the advent of the role in the life of women, it is perceived that the force linked to power, wanting to learn have become more accessible to women and this development throughout life marks the vicissitudes that education manifested in the life of each individual.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIERRE FORCE

This article revisits what has often been called the “naive presentism” of Voltaire's historical work. It looks at the methodological and philosophical reasons for Voltaire's deliberate focus on modern history as opposed to ancient history, his refusal to “make allowances for time” in judging the past, and his extreme selectiveness in determining the relevance of past events to world history. Voltaire's historical practice is put in the context of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, and considered in a tradition of universal history going back to Bossuet and leading up to nineteenth-century German historicism. Paradoxically, Voltaire is a major figure in the history of historiography not in spite of his presentism (as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay have argued), but because of it.


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