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This book offers the first systematic analysis of the cultural and religious appropriation of Andalusian architecture by Spanish historians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern Spain was left with a significant Islamic heritage: Córdoba Mosque had been turned into a cathedral, in Seville the Aljama Mosque’s minaret was transformed into a Christian bell tower, and Granada Alhambra had become a Renaissance palace. To date this process of Christian appropriation has frequently been discussed as a phenomenon of hybridisation. However, during that period the construction of a Spanish national identity became a key focus of historical discourse. The aforementioned cultural hybridity encountered partial opposition from those seeking to establish cultural and religious homogeneity. The Iberian Peninsula’s Islamic past became a major concern and historical writing served as the site for a complex negotiation of identity. Historians and antiquarians used a range of strategies to re-appropriate the meaning of medieval Islamic heritage as befitted the new identity of Spain as a Catholic monarchy and empire. On one hand, the monuments’ Islamic origin was subjected to historical revisions and re-identified as Roman or Phoenician. On the other hand, religious forgeries were invented that staked claims for buildings and cities having been founded by Christians prior to the arrival of the Muslims in Spain. Islamic stones were used as core evidence in debates shaping the early development of archaeology, and they also became the centre of a historical controversy about the origin of Spain as a nation and its ecclesiastical history.

Presenting a new departure on Holocaust testimony, this book combines analytical reflections by scholars from different backgrounds on the post-war memories of one survivor, Helen “Zippi” Tichauer. Born in Bratislava in 1918, she came to Auschwitz in spring 1942 in the second transport of Jewish women from Slovakia, and was one of the few early arrivals who survived Auschwitz and its evacuation. Against the background of Zippi's early post-war and later memories, this book raises key questions on the meaning and usages of survivor testimony. What do we know and how much can we understand, sixty years after the end of the Nazi era, about the workings of a Nazi death camp and the life of its inmates? How willing are scholars, students and the public to listen to and learn from the fascinating, yet often unwieldy, confusing, and discomforting experiences of a Holocaust survivor? How can those experiences be communicated to teach and educate without undue simplification and glossing over of problematic aspects inherent in both, the life stories and their current rendering? Written by expert Holocaust scholars, this book presents a new, multi-faceted approach toward Zippi's unique story combined with the analysis of key aspects of Holocaust memory, its forms and functions.

This book tells the story of Jewish survivors who pioneered Holocaust research in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Just liberated from Nazi terror, amidst political turmoil and privation, physically exhausted and traumatized women and men founded historical commissions and documentation centers throughout Europe to chronicle the Nazi Final Solution. By comparing the cases of France, Poland, and the Displaced Persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy, the book explores the motivations and methods which guided survivors in compiling archives of tens of thousands of Nazi documents, eyewitness accounts and questionnaires, ghetto and camp literature, wartime diaries, and artifacts, and in publishing dozens of historical works. Its comparative method illuminates the transnational dimension of Jewish Holocaust research and its place within the larger context of twentieth-century Jewish historiography. It argues that these documentation initiatives not only perpetuated certain Jewish cultural traditions of history writing and memory that predated the Holocaust but that collecting, recording, and researching the Jewish catastrophe had a vital function in survivors’ posttraumatic recovery. In their use of victim and perpetrator sources and social-science-oriented research methods and their focus on the history of the everyday life and death of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers anticipated methodological questions and debates over the use of victim testimony and the writing of history “from below” which entered academic Holocaust historiography only toward the end of the twentieth century. It also takes issue with the widespread misconception that all Holocaust testimony was belated, due to survivors’ decades-long silence, and that systematic Holocaust historiography began only with the 1960s.

This book is an examination of Britain as a democratic society; what it means to describe it as such; and how we can attempt such an examination. The book does this via a number of ‘case-studies’ which approach the subject in different ways: J.M. Keynes and his analysis of British social structures; the political career of Harold Nicolson and his understanding of democratic politics; the novels of A.J. Cronin, especially The Citadel, and what they tell us about the definition of democracy in the interwar years. The book also investigates the evolution of the British party political system until the present day and attempts to suggest why it has become so apparently unstable. There are also two chapters on sport as representative of the British social system as a whole as well as the ways in which the British influenced the sporting systems of other countries. The book has a marked comparative theme, including one chapter which compares British and Australian political cultures and which shows British democracy in a somewhat different light from the one usually shone on it. The concluding chapter brings together the overall argument.

This book is the first full length biography of Robert (c.1088 × 90–1147), grandson of William the Conqueror and eldest son of King Henry I of England (1100–35). He could not succeed his father because he was a bastard. Instead, as the earl of Gloucester, Robert helped change the course of English history by keeping alive the prospects for an Angevin succession through his leadership of its supporters in the civil war known as the Anarchy against his father’s successor, King Stephen (1135–54). The earl is one of the great figures of Anglo-Norman History (1066–1154). He was one of only three landed super-magnates of his day, a model post-Conquest great baron, Marcher lord, borough developer, and patron of the rising merchant class. His trans-Channel barony stretched from western Lower Normandy across England to South Wales. He was both product as well as agent of the contemporary cultural revival known as the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, bilingual, well educated, and a significant literary patron. In this last role, he is especially notable for commissioning the greatest English historian since Bede, William of Malmesbury, to produce a history of their times which justified the Empress Matilda’s claim to the English throne and Earl Robert’s support of it.

Empires of Antiquities is a history of the rediscovery of the imperial civilizations of the ancient Near East in a modern imperial order that evolved between the outbreak of the First World War and the decolonization of the British Empire in the 1950s. It explores the ways in which near eastern antiquity was redefined and experienced, becoming the subject of imperial regulation, modes of enquiry, and international and national politics. A series of globally publicized spectacular archaeological discoveries in Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, which the book follows, made antiquity material visible and accessible as never before. The book demonstrates that the new definition and uses of antiquity and their relations to modernity were inseparable from the emergence of the post-war international imperial order, transnational collaboration and crises, the aspirations of national groups, and collisions between them and the British mandatories. It uniquely combines a history of the internationalization of archaeology and the rise of a new “regime of antiquities” under the oversight of the League of Nations and its institutions, a history of British attitudes to, and passion for, near eastern antiquity and on-the-ground colonial policies and mechanisms, as well as nationalist claims on the past. It points to the centrality of the new mandate system, particularly mandates classified A in Mesopotamia/Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan, formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire, and of Egypt, in the new archaeological regime. Drawing on an unusually wide range of materials collected in archives in six countries, as well as on material and visual evidence, the book weaves together imperial, international, and national histories, and the history of archaeological discovery which it connects to imperial modernity.

What happens when a society attempts to obscure inconvenient episodes in its past? In 1798, Ulster Protestants—in particular Presbyterians—participated alongside Catholics in the failed republican rebellion of the United Irishmen. In subsequent years, communities in counties Antrim and Down that had been heavily involved in the insurrection reconciled with the newly formed United Kingdom and identified with unionism. As Protestant loyalists closed ranks in face of resurgent Catholic nationalism, with many joining the Orange Order, Presbyterians had a vested interest to consign their rebel past to oblivion. Uncovering a vernacular historiography, to be found in oral traditions and often-unnoticed local writings, Guy Beiner shows that recollections of the rebellion persisted under a public facade of forgetting. Beneath a culture of silencing and reticence, he finds muted traditions of forgetful remembrance. Beiner follows the dynamics of social forgetting for over two centuries, starting with anxieties of being forgotten that preceded the insurrection. He reveals how bitter memories of repression prevented a policy of amnesty from facilitating amnesia. Clandestine traditions of defiant remembrance were regenerated and transmitted over several generations, yet when commemoration emerged into the open, it was met with violent responses. Prohibitions on public remembrance of 1798 seemed to come to an end by the bicentennial year of 1998, with the signing of the peace agreement in Northern Ireland, however the ambiguity of memory continues into the current post-conflict era. Comparative references demonstrate the wider relevance of the historical study of social forgetting.

Future History analyzes English and American writings that imagine England on a global stage well before England became an empire or the United States became a global power. Through close readings, historical contextualization, application of archival theory, and careful speculation, the book traces the ways that English and American writers imagined the East Indies and the West Indies as interconnected. The book argues that the earliest expressions of an American or English worldview were born colonial, conceived at the margins of a rising empire, not in its metropolis, and that a wider variety of agents than we have previously understood—Algonquian converts, “reformed” Catholics, enslaved women in the spice trade, Protestant dissidents, West Indian maroons—helped shape that worldview. In order to recover these voices and experiences, so often overwritten or ignored, the book combines more traditional methodologies of literary analysis and historicization with an interrogation of the structures of the archives in which early writings have been preserved. The chapters taken together describe a particular global (East Indies–West Indies) literary history, while the codas, taken as a separate sequence, demonstrate how a “slant” view on literary history that is asynchronous and at times anachronistic affords a new and more inclusive view of the worlding of the English imagination in the seventeenth century.

This book presents a cultural history of graphic signs such as the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other graphic devices, examining how they were employed to relate to and interact with the supernatural world, and to represent and communicate secular and divine authority in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe. It analyses its graphic visual material with reference to specific historical contexts and to relevant late antique and early medieval texts as a complementary way of looking at the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the late Graeco-Roman world to that of medieval Europe. This monograph treats such graphic signs as typologically similar forms of visual communication, reliant on the visual-spatial ability of human cognition to process object-like graphic forms as proxies for concepts and abstract notions—an ability that is commonly discussed in modern visual studies with reference to categories such as visual thinking, graphic visualization, and graphicacy. Thanks to this human ability, the aforementioned graphic signs were actively employed in religious and socio-political communication in the first millennium ad. This approach allows for a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments, and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. As such, this book will serve as a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists as well as the informed general public.

The end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth saw an explosion of creativity in English historical writing. In the space of a few decades, Roger of Howden, Ralph of Diceto, William of Newburgh, Gerald of Wales, Gervase of Canterbury, Ralph of Coggeshall, Richard of Devizes, Walter Map, and Richard de Templo, among others, produced works that have been praised for their variety, their historical value, and their originality. All these writers chose to focus on recent events, and some of them explained that they did so because their own times were simply so interesting. They pointed to the Great Revolt of 1173–4, the crusade and captivity of Richard the Lionheart, wars abroad and political upheaval at home. The fact that so many people, writing in England around the same time, chose to write about the events they had lived through, allows us to evaluate the evidence of one writer against another. But it also affords us a rare insight into the attitudes, mentalities, and frames of reference with which they approached these events. This book presents, first, an introduction to the writers in question, and an analysis of their approach to historical writing. Secondly, it shows how these writers addressed certain themes prominent in their works, from kingship to religious difference. In this way we can gain a greater understanding not only of the historians themselves and the subjects they wrote about, but of contemporary historiography, intellectual life, and political thought.

What does it mean—and what might it yet come to mean—to write ‘history’ in the twenty-first century? This volume brings together leading historians from across the globe to ask what being an historian should mean in their particular fields of study. Taking their cue from one of the previous century’s greatest historians, Eric Hobsbawm, and his interests across many periods and places, the essays approach their subjects with an underlying sense of what the best role an historian might seek to play, and attempt to help twenty-first century society to understand ‘how we got here’. They present new work in their subfields, but also pointers to how their specialisms are developing, how they might further grow in the future, and how different areas of focus might speak to the larger challenges of history—both for the discipline itself and for its relationship to other fields of academic inquiry. Like Hobsbawn, the authors in this collection know that history matters. They speak to both the past and the present and, in so doing, present some of the most exciting new lines of research in a broad array of subjects, from the medieval period to the present.

Against majority opinion within his profession, Donald Bloxham argues that it is legitimate, often unavoidable, and frequently important for historians to make value judgements about the past. History and Morality draws on a wide range of historical examples, and its author’s insights as a practising historian. Examining concepts like impartiality, neutrality, contextualization, and the use and abuse of the idea of the past as a foreign country, Bloxham’s book investigates how the discipline has got to the point where what is preached can be so inconsistent with what is practised. It illuminates how far tacit moral judgements infuse works of history, and how strange those histories would look if the judgements were removed. Bloxham argues that rather than trying to eradicate all judgemental elements from their work historians need to think more consistently about how, and with what justification, they make the judgements that they do. The importance of all this lies not just in the responsibilities that historians bear towards the past—responsibilities to take historical actors on those actors’ own terms and to portray the impact of those actors’ deeds—but also in the role of history as a source of identity, pride, and shame in the present. The account of moral thought in History and Morality has ramifications far beyond the activities of vocational historians.

This book provides an insight to the teaching and writing of history in postcolonial India. It traces the different events that shaped postcolonial Indian historiography like the textbook controversies from 1970s to the present day; the historical perspectives surrounding the Babri Masjid; flaring up of religious sentiments over ‘beef-eating’; and the debate over the existence of Ram Sethu. The book also explores how Indian historians attempted to decolonize history and ‘reclaim’ Indian history from its colonial past. It outlines how history is used as means to forge national identity and shape notions of citizenship in independent India. Discussing diverse areas — such as methodological research and the public use of history; nationalism and communalism; cultural identity and diversity; social movements; and the role of women, Adivasis, and Dalits in a multicultural society — this book explores how politics and history have shaped each other in independent India.

History and historians in India have gained prominence in the public sphere in recent years. The undisputed ascendancy of history in modern India may be briefly gauged by two developments. The first was Amartya Sen's keynote address at the annual meeting of the Indian History Congress in early January 2001. Sen warned against the manipulation of history in the service of sectarian political interests, and the diminishing of India's ‘magnificently multireligious and heterodox history’ at the hands of bigots. The second was the controversy over the overt politicization of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), a national body created to promote historical thinking and research. In its public aspect, the study of Indian history appears to revolve mainly around the polarity of Hindutva history and the history associated with left, secular historians. This book explores the politics of history-writing in modern India, narrativizing the engagement of a civilization with historical sensibility and modality. It examines how the discipline of history began to assume importance in colonial and independent India. It offers an account of the nationalist obsession with history in the nineteenth century, the relationship between nation-building and the making of Indian history, the effort to render Hinduism into a faith akin to the monotheistic religions, an interpretive history and critique of the subaltern school, and Indian history in cyberspace.

Providing an interdisciplinary and global perspective on immigration to the United States, this book represents an important step forward in the development of immigration studies. The book aims to help redirect thinking on the subject of immigration by giving a summary of the current state of immigration studies and a coherent new perspective that emphasizes the international dimensions of the immigrant experience from the time of the slave trade to present-day movements of Asian and Latin American peoples. This book challenges ethnocentric American or European perspectives on immigration, disputes the classical assimilation model of a linear progression of immigrant cultures toward a dominant American national character, questions human capital theory as an explanation of ethnic group achievement, reveals conflicting ethnic and racial attitudes toward immigration restriction, and examines the revival of interest in oral history, immigrant autobiographies, and other subjective documents.

This book presents a view of the history of the American West at the end of the 20th century. It is a systematic assessment of the current state of Western history. The book covers major new areas of emphasis. The debate over the history of the American West has become as energetic as the older debate over the meaning of the frontier in American history. Contrived confrontations are tedious, but legitimate intellectual inquiry can be exciting. Other voices need to be included in this intellectual conversation. For this reason, scholars of diverse backgrounds and interests have written shorter chapters that respond to one of the seven major chapters. Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Asia and Asian Americans, gender, the natural environment, human perception, and the role of the West itself in America's history are all vital subjects.

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.

The fifth volume of this series offers chapters on the writing of history globally since 1945. Divided into two parts, part one selects and surveys theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches to history, and part two examines select national and regional historiographies throughout the world. It aims at once to provide an authoritative survey of the field and to provoke cross-cultural comparisons. This is chronologically the last of five volumes in a series that explores representations of the past across the globe from the beginning of writing to the present day.

The worlds of historians and archivists used to converge around shared understandings of “authoritative” history. This book explores the dramatic changes that have split them apart. Written by an archivist and a historian for the general reader as well as specialists, it shows how shared notions of historical authority and the evidentiary power of archival documentation have given way to radically different approaches to processing the past. New historical thinking, new conceptions of archives, changing notions of historical authority, modifications in archival practices, and new information technologies have opened an “archival divide.” This book situates archives as subjects rather than places of study. It explores how active archivists have long shaped historical knowledge through processes of appraisal, description, and access that have become increasingly contingent and problematic. For historians and those interested in history, the book explains the challenges archivists face in managing both traditional and digital documentation. It examines how archives have traditionally acquired and processed materials deemed “archival” and the changes wrought by the explosive growth of documents of all sorts. For archivists and others, it explores the demands of contemporary historical enquiry, including those relating to social memory, identity politics, and changing conceptions of historical “truth,” and their implications for archival research. For all readers this volume raises the worrisome question of what future historical archives might be like if scholars and archivists no longer understand each other, and indeed, whether their now different notions of what is properly archival and historical will ever again be joined.

This volume is the first of a new series from the Oxford Centre for Global History. It seeks to apply global history rather than merely preach it, and suggests a number of ways in which this can be done. East Asian and Islamic perspectives are here taken as seriously as European ones. The volume insists on depth in historical analysis, or longue durée, and speaks to those interested in medieval and ancient history quite as much as modern history. At the same time, it offers case studies from a wide geographical range. Chapters range from historical sociology to economic history, from ancient and medieval to modern times, from European expansion to constitutional history, from the United States across South Asia to China.