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In recent decades, the insight that narration shapes our perception of reality has inspired and influenced the most innovative historical accounts. Focusing on new research, this volume explores the history of non-elite populations in cities from Caracas to Vienna, and Paris to Belgrade. Narration is central to the theme of each contribution, whether as a means of description, a methodological approach, or basic story telling. This book brings together research that both asks classical socio-historical questions and takes narration seriously, engaging with novels, films, local history accounts, petitions to municipal authorities, and interviews with alternative cinema activists.

A scholar of Hellenistic and Prussian history, Droysen developed a historical theory that at the time was unprecedented in range and depth, and which remains to the present day a valuable key for understanding history as both an idea and a professional practice. Arthur Alfaix Assis interprets Droysen's theoretical project as an attempt to redefine the function of historiography within the context of a rising criticism of exemplar theories of history, and focuses on Droysen's claim that the goal underlying historical writing and reading should be the development of the subjective capacity to think historically. In addition, Assis examines the connections and disconnections between Droysen's theory of historical thinking, his practice of historical thought, and his political activism. Ultimately, Assis not only shows how Droysen helped reinvent the relationship between historical knowledge and human agency, but also traces some of the contradictions and limitations inherent to that project.

Cold War history has emphasized the division of Europe into two warring camps with separate ideologies and little in common. This volume presents an alternative perspective by suggesting that there were transnational networks bridging the gap and connecting like-minded people on both sides of the divide. Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were institutions, organizations, and individuals who brought people from the East and the West together, joined by shared professions, ideas, and sometimes even through marriage. The volume aims at proving that the post-WWII histories of Western and Eastern Europe were entangled by looking at cases involving France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, and others.

The writing and reading of history in the early Middle Ages form the key themes of this 2004 book. The primary focus is on the remarkable manifestations of historical writing in relation to historical memory in the Frankish kingdoms of the eighth and ninth centuries. It considers the audiences for history in the Frankish kingdoms, the recording of memory in new genres including narrative histories, cartularies and Libri memoriales, and thus particular perceptions of the Frankish and Christian past. It analyses both original manuscript material and key historical texts from the Carolingian period, a remarkably creative period in the history of European culture. Presentations of the past developed in this period were crucial in forming an historical understanding of the Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian past and, in subsequent centuries, of early medieval Europe. They also played an extraordinarily influential role in the formation of political ideologies and senses of identity within Europe.

This volume offers a stimulating new perspective on the history of historical studies. Through the prism of ‘scholarly personae’, it explores why historians care about attitudes or dispositions that they consider necessary for studying the past, yet often disagree about what virtues, skills, or competencies are most important. More specifically, the volume explains why models of virtue known as ‘personae’ have always been contested, yet also can prove remarkably stable, especially with regard to their race, class, and gender assumptions. Covering historical studies across Europe, North America, Africa, and East Asia, How to be a historian will appeal not only to historians of historiography, but to all historians who occasionally wonder: What kind of a historian do I want to be?

In Rage and Denials, philosopher and architectural historian Branko Mitrovi? examines in detail the historiography of art and architecture in the twentieth century, with a focus on the debate between the understanding of society as a set of individuals and the understanding of individuals as mere manifestations of the collectives to which they belong. The conflict between these two views constitutes a core methodological problem of the philosophy of history and was intensely debated by twentieth-century art historians—one of the few art-historical debates with a wide range of implications for the entire field of the humanities. Mitrovi? presents the most significant positions and arguments in this dispute as they were articulated in the art- and architectural-historical discourse as well as in the wider context of the historiography and philosophy of history of the era. He explores the philosophical content of scholarship engaged in these debates, examining the authors' positions, the intricacies and implications of their arguments, and the rise and dominance of collectivist art historiography after the 1890s. He centers his study on the key art-historical figures Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich, and Hans Sedlmayr while drawing attention to the writings of the less well known Vasiliy Pavlovich Zubov. Rage and Denials offers a valuable window onto how key aspects of modern research in the humanities took shape over the course of the twentieth century.

From the late fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works grew from complex early modern debates about law, religion and classical scholarship. Anthony Grafton's book is based on his Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, and it proves to be a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas. Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight – and why, in the centuries that followed, most scholars gradually forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr's celebrated Trevelyan Lectures, What Is History?.

Carlo Ginzburg's brilliant and timely new essay collection takes a bold stand against naive positivism and allegedly sophisticated neo-skepticism. It looks deeply into questions raised by decades of post-structuralism: What constitutes historical truth? How do we draw a boundary between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? How do we grapple with the historical conventions that inform, in different ways, all written documents? In his answers, Ginzburg peels away layers of subsequent readings and interpretations that envelop every text to make a larger argument about history and fiction. Interwoven with compelling autobiographical references, Threads and Traces bears moving witness to Ginzburg's life as a European Jew, the abiding strength of his scholarship, and his deep engagement with the historian's craft.

From the early modern period, Greek historiography has been studied in the context of Cicero's notion historia magistra vitae and considered to exclude conceptions of the future as different from the present and past. Comparisons with the Roman, Judeo-Christian and modern historiography have sought to justify this perspective by drawing on a category of the future as a temporal mode that breaks with the present. In this volume, distinguished classicists and historians challenge this contention by raising the question of what the future was and meant in antiquity by offering fresh considerations of prognostic and anticipatory voices in Greek historiography from Herodotus to Appian and by tracing the roots of established views on historical time in the opposition between antiquity and modernity. They look both at contemporary scholarly argument and the writings of Greek historians in order to explore the relation of time, especially the future, to an idea of the historical that is formulated in the plural and is always in motion. By reflecting on the prognostic of historical time the volume will be of interest not only to classical scholars, but to all who are interested in the history and theory of historical time.