Doing Recent History

Doing Recent History PDF Author: Claire Bond Potter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820343714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Recent history—the very phrase seems like an oxymoron. Yet historians have been writing accounts of the recent past since printed history acquired a modern audience, and in the last several years interest in recent topics has grown exponentially. With subjects as diverse as Walmart and disco, and personalities as disparate as Chavez and Schlafly, books about the history of our own time have become arguably the most exciting and talked-about part of the discipline. Despite this rich tradition and growing popularity, historians have engaged in little discussion about the specific methodological, political, and ethical issues related to writing about the recent past. The twelve essays in this collection explore the challenges of writing histories of recent events where visibility is inherently imperfect, hindsight and perspective are lacking, and historiography is underdeveloped. Those who write about events that have taken place since 1970 encounter exciting challenges that are both familiar and foreign to scholars of a more distant past, including suspicions that their research is not historical enough, negotiation with living witnesses who have a very strong stake in their own representation, and the task of working with new electronic sources. Contributors to this collection consider a wide range of these challenges. They question how sources like television and video games can be better utilized in historical research, explore the role and regulation of doing oral histories, consider the ethics of writing about living subjects, discuss how historians can best navigate questions of privacy and copyright law, and imagine the possibilities that new technologies offer for creating transnational and translingual research opportunities. Doing Recent History offers guidance and insight to any researcher considering tackling the not-so-distant past.

Doing Recent History

Doing Recent History PDF Author: Claire Bond Potter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820343714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Recent history—the very phrase seems like an oxymoron. Yet historians have been writing accounts of the recent past since printed history acquired a modern audience, and in the last several years interest in recent topics has grown exponentially. With subjects as diverse as Walmart and disco, and personalities as disparate as Chavez and Schlafly, books about the history of our own time have become arguably the most exciting and talked-about part of the discipline. Despite this rich tradition and growing popularity, historians have engaged in little discussion about the specific methodological, political, and ethical issues related to writing about the recent past. The twelve essays in this collection explore the challenges of writing histories of recent events where visibility is inherently imperfect, hindsight and perspective are lacking, and historiography is underdeveloped. Those who write about events that have taken place since 1970 encounter exciting challenges that are both familiar and foreign to scholars of a more distant past, including suspicions that their research is not historical enough, negotiation with living witnesses who have a very strong stake in their own representation, and the task of working with new electronic sources. Contributors to this collection consider a wide range of these challenges. They question how sources like television and video games can be better utilized in historical research, explore the role and regulation of doing oral histories, consider the ethics of writing about living subjects, discuss how historians can best navigate questions of privacy and copyright law, and imagine the possibilities that new technologies offer for creating transnational and translingual research opportunities. Doing Recent History offers guidance and insight to any researcher considering tackling the not-so-distant past.

Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)

Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) PDF Author: Sam Wineburg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635735X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
A look at how to teach history in the age of easily accessible—but not always reliable—information. Let’s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become clichés: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percent of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious. With the Internet at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), professor Sam Wineburg has the answers, beginning with this: We can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-question snoozefest. If we want to educate citizens who can separate fact from fake, we have to equip them with new tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows, has nothing to do with the ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that cultivates reasoned skepticism and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg lays out a mine-filled landscape, but one that with care, attention, and awareness, we can learn to navigate. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands. Praise for Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) “If every K-12 teacher of history and social studies read just three chapters of this book—”Crazy for History,” “Changing History . . . One Classroom at a Time,” and “Why Google Can’t Save Us” —the ensuing transformation of our populace would save our democracy.” —James W. Lowen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened “A sobering and urgent report from the leading expert on how American history is taught in the nation’s schools. . . . A bracing, edifying, and vital book.” —Jill Lepore, New Yorker staff writer and author of These Truths “Wineburg is a true innovator who has thought more deeply about the relevance of history to the Internet—and vice versa—than any other scholar I know. Anyone interested in the uses and abuses of history today has a duty to read this book.” —Niall Ferguson, senior fellow, Hoover Institution, and author of The Ascent of Money and Civilization

Origin Story

Origin Story PDF Author: David Christian
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316392022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This New York Times bestseller "elegantly weaves evidence and insights . . . into a single, accessible historical narrative" (Bill Gates) and presents a captivating history of the universe -- from the Big Bang to dinosaurs to mass globalization and beyond. Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day -- and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of "Big History," the most exciting new approach to understanding where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. In Origin Story, Christian takes readers on a wild ride through the entire 13.8 billion years we've come to know as "history." By focusing on defining events (thresholds), major trends, and profound questions about our origins, Christian exposes the hidden threads that tie everything together -- from the creation of the planet to the advent of agriculture, nuclear war, and beyond. With stunning insights into the origin of the universe, the beginning of life, the emergence of humans, and what the future might bring, Origin Story boldly reframes our place in the cosmos.

Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974

Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 PDF Author: Kevin M. Kruse
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039363454X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Book Description
"A gripping and troubling account of the origins of our turbulent times.” —Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States When—and how—did America become so polarized? In this masterful history, leading historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer uncover the origins of our current moment. It all starts in 1974 with the Watergate crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, desegregation busing riots in Boston, and the wind-down of the Vietnam War. What follows is the story of our own lifetimes. It is the story of ever-widening historical fault lines over economic inequality, race, gender, and sexual norms firing up a polarized political landscape. It is also the story of profound transformations of the media and our political system fueling the fire. Kruse and Zelizer’s Fault Lines is a master class in national divisions nearly five decades in the making.

The Making of Modern Irish History

The Making of Modern Irish History PDF Author: D. George Boyce
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134807627
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This volume brings together distinguished historians of Ireland, each of whom tackles a key question, issue or event in Irish history since the eighteenth century and: * examines its historiography * assesses the context of new interpretations * considers the strengths and weaknesses of revisionist ideas * offers their own interpretation. Topics covered are not only of historical interest but, in the context of recent revisionist debates, of contemporary political significance. These original contributions take account of new evidence and perspectives, as well as up-to-date historical methodology. Their combination of synthesis and analysis represent a valuable guide to the present state of the writing of modern Irish history.

Very Recent History

Very Recent History PDF Author: Choire Sicha
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062198998
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Very Recent History by Choire Sicha is an idiosyncratic and elegant narrative that follows a handful of young men in New York City as they navigate the ruins of money and power—in search of love and connection. After the Wall Street crash of 2008, the richest man in town is the mayor. Billionaires shed apartments like last season’s fashions, even as the country’s economy turns inside out. The young and careless go on as they always have, getting laid and getting laid off, falling in and out of love, and trying to navigate the strange world they traffic in: the Internet, complex financial markets, credit cards, pop stars, micro-plane cheese graters, and sex apps. A true-life fable of money, sex, and politics, Choire Sicha’s Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City turns our focus to a year in the life of a great city.

Marking Modern Times

Marking Modern Times PDF Author: Alexis McCrossen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022601486X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks, and expands our understanding of the ways we have standardized time and have made timekeepers serve as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that not merely values time, but regards access to it as a natural-born right.

Doing History

Doing History PDF Author: Mark Donnelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100022046X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Doing History bridges the gap between the way history is studied in school or as represented in the media and the way it is studied at university level. History as an academic discipline has dramatically changed in recent decades and has been enhanced by ideas from other disciplines, the influence of postmodernism and historians’ incorporation of their own reflections into their work. Doing History presents the ideas and debates that shape how we ‘do’ history today, covering arguments about the nature of historical knowledge and the function of historical writing, whether we can ever really know what happened in the past, what sources historians depend on, and the relative value of popular and academic histories. This revised edition includes new chapters on public history and activist histories. It looks at global representations of the past across the centuries, and provides up-to-date suggestions for further reading, presenting the reader with a thorough and current introduction to studying history at an academic level as well as a pathway to progress this study further. Clearly structured and accessibly written, it is an essential volume for all students embarking on the study of history.

The Presence of the Past

The Presence of the Past PDF Author: Roy Rosenzweig
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231500487
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Some people make photo albums, collect antiques, or visit historic battlefields. Others keep diaries, plan annual family gatherings, or stitch together patchwork quilts in a tradition learned from grandparents. Each of us has ways of communing with the past, and our reasons for doing so are as varied as our memories. In a sweeping survey, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen asked 1,500 Americans about their connection to the past and how it influences their daily lives and hopes for the future. The result is a surprisingly candid series of conversations and reflections on how the past infuses the present with meaning. Rosenzweig and Thelen found that people assemble their experiences into narratives that allow them to make sense of their personal histories, set priorities, project what might happen next, and try to shape the future. By using these narratives to mark change and create continuity, people chart the courses of their lives. A young woman from Ohio speaks of giving birth to her first child, which caused her to reflect upon her parents and the ways that their example would help her to become a good mother. An African American man from Georgia tells how he and his wife were drawn to each other by their shared experiences and lessons learned from growing up in the South in the 1950s. Others reveal how they personalize historical events, as in the case of a Massachusetts woman who traces much of her guarded attitude toward life to witnessing the assassination of John F. Kennedy on television when she was a child. While the past is omnipresent to Americans, "history" as it is usually defined in textbooks leaves many people cold. Rosenzweig and Thelen found that history as taught in school does not inspire a strong connection to the past. And they reveal how race and ethnicity affects how Americans perceive the past: while most white Americans tend to think of it as something personal, African Americans and American Indians are more likely to think in terms of broadly shared experiences--like slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the violation of Indian treaties." Rosenzweig and Thelen's conclusions about the ways people use their personal, family, and national stories have profound implications for anyone involved in researching or presenting history, as well as for all those who struggle to engage with the past in a meaningful way.

Power and Time

Power and Time PDF Author: Dan Edelstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022648162X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.