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This course introduces the basic problems and methods of research into history. It will unfold around two keywords. First, it will discuss what historians call ‘sources’, as well as how to access them, evaluate them, and analyse them for research. Second, it will introduce the concept of ‘historiography’, namely the ways historians organise sources—often fragmented information—into narratives about the past through analyses.
This book looks not just at developments in the West but also at the other great historiographical traditions in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere around the world over the course of the past two and a half centuries. This second edition contains fully updated sections on Latin American and African historiography, discussion of the development of global history, environmental history, and feminist and gender history in recent years, and new coverage of Russian historical practices. The authors analyse historical currents in a changing political, social and cultural context, examining both the adaptation and modification of the Western influence on historiography and how societies outside Europe and America found their own ways in the face of modernization and globalization.
This book introduces the major theoretical approaches employed by historians. The first chapter outlines four questions designed to assist readers in eliciting and understanding the theorization underlying a work of history: authorial context, temporal framework, drivers of change, and subjectivities. Subsequent chapters focus on a particular theory each. Altogether fourteen schools of theory are examined, from the empiricist to the postcolonial, including chapters on Marxist history, Freud and psychohistory, the Annales, historical sociology, quantitative history, anthropology and ethnohistorians, narrative, gender, poststructuralism, public history, oral history, and history of the emotions.
This third edition explores the emergence and development of history as a discipline and the major theoretical developments that have informed historical writing. It consists of five parts. Part One explores the establishment of history as a specific university discipline in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Parts Two, Three, and Four explore the major methodological shifts within professional history- the social turn, the cultural turn, and the eclecticism of contemporary historical writing. Part Five examines the impact of all these methodological shifts within some specific fields- political history, social history, cultural history, economic history, and the history of ideas.
This book studies women in the May Fourth period, reconfiguring the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective and addressing the question how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally. Wang investigates the life stories of five Chinese women activists born in the initial decade of the twentieth century. They are Lu Lihua (born in 1900), a school principal; Zhu Su’e (born in 1901), an attorney; Wang Yiwei (born in 1905), an editor in chief; Chen Yongsheng (born in 1900), an educator; and Huang Dinghui (born in 1907), a career revolutionary. Their life stories constitute a portrait of women’s struggle towards national salvation and self-emancipation.
