A third approach to history


Book Description

The narration of humankind’s past, that is to say its history, has up to now been done using the extrinsic method of geographic territorial reference and temporal chronological and local topical reference, sometimes together, sometimes separately, almost to form a single expression or two different expressions: two approaches in which to insert the list (quantitative or selective or explicative or annotated) of human events. And it is to this that I address myself at first, before going on to examine the possibility of using a third approach to history, with the choice of intrinsic historical values to highlight.




Writing History in the Third Republic


Book Description

This book offers new insight to one of the most neglected periods of historiographical output: that of French historians between 1860 and 1914, a period often referred to as of positivistic historians or the école méthodique. Having sought to assert their independence from Germanic influence by emphasising the French element in their work, historians in the period comprised between 1860 and 1914 sometimes described their approach as positivistic and maintained that this was a distinctively Fr.




Reversing Sail


Book Description

This book examines the global unfolding of the African Diaspora, the migrations and dispersals of people of African, from antiquity to the modern period. Their exploits, challenges, and struggles are discussed over a wide expanse of time in ways that link as well as differentiate past and present circumstances. The experiences of Africans in the Old World, in the Mediterranean and Islamic worlds, is followed by their movement into the New, where their plight in lands claimed by Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English colonial powers is analyzed from enslavement through the Cold War. While appropriate mention is made of persons of renown, particular attention is paid to the everyday lives of working class people and their cultural efflorescence. The book also attempts to explain contemporary plights and struggles through the lens of history.




The Philosophy of History


Book Description




Human Rights from a Third World Perspective


Book Description

Globalization, interdisciplinarity, and the critique of the Eurocentric canon are transforming the theory and practice of human rights. This collection takes up the point of view of the colonized in order to unsettle and supplement the conventional understanding of human rights. Putting together insights coming from Decolonial Thinking, the Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL), Radical Black Theory and Subaltern Studies, the authors construct a new history and theory of human rights, and a more comprehensive understanding of international human rights law in the background of modern colonialism and the struggle for global justice. An exercise of dialogical and interdisciplinary thinking, this collection of articles by leading scholars puts into conversation important areas of research on human rights, namely philosophy or theory of human rights, history, and constitutional and international law. This book combines critical consciousness and moral sensibility, and offers methods of interpretation or hermeneutical strategies to advance the project of decolonizing human rights, a veritable tool-box to create new Third-World discourses of human rights.




Approaches to History


Book Description

The contributors to this volume, originally published in 1962, explain the raison d’être of their own specialism in history be it archaeology, political, local, economic or social history or historical geography.




The Rise of Comparative History


Book Description

This book—the first of a three-volume overview of comparative and transnational historiography in Europe—focuses on the complex engagement of various comparative methodological approaches with different transnational and supranational frameworks. It considers scales from universal history to meso-regional (i.e. Balkans, Central Europe, etc.) perspectives. In the form of a reader, it displays 18 historical studies written between 1900 and 1943. The collection starts with the French and German methodological discussions around the turn of the twentieth century, stemming from the effort to integrate history with other emerging social sciences on a comparative methodological basis. The volume then turns to the question of structural and institutional comparisons, revisiting various historiographical ventures that tried to sketch out a broader (regional or European-level) interpretative framework to assess the legal systems, patterns of agrarian production, and the common ethnographic and sociocultural features. In the third part, a number of texts are presented, which put forward a supra-national research framework as an antidote to national exclusivism. While in Western Europe the most obvious such framework was pan-European, in East Central Europe the agenda of comparison was linked usually to a meso-regional framework. The studies are accompanied by short contextual introductions including biographical information on the respective authors.




History of International Relations Theory


Book Description

Torbjorn L. Knutsen introduces ideas on international relations expressed by thinkers from the High Middle Ages to the present day and traces the development of four ever-present themes: war, peace, wealth and power. The book counters the view that international relations has no theoretical tradition and shows that scholars, soldiers and statesmen have been speculating about the subject for the last 700 years. Beginning with the roots of the state and the concept of sovereignty in the Middle Ages, the author draws upon the insights of outstanding political thinkers - from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Hegel, Rousseau, and Marx and contemporary thinkers such as Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Morgenthau and Walt - who profoundly influenced the emergence of a discrete discipline of International Relations in the twentieth century. Fully revised and updated, the final section embraces more recent approaches to the study of international relations, most notably postmodernism and ecologism.




A People's History of the United States


Book Description

Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools -- with its emphasis on great men in high places -- to focus on the street, the home, and the, workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles -- the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality -- were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States, which was nominated for the American Book Award in 1981, features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history. Revised, updated, and featuring a new after, word by the author, this special twentieth anniversary edition continues Zinn's important contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.




The History of Mathematics: A Source-Based Approach, Volume 2


Book Description

The History of Mathematics: A Source-Based Approach is a comprehensive history of the development of mathematics. This, the second volume of a two-volume set, takes the reader from the invention of the calculus to the beginning of the twentieth century. The initial discoverers of calculus are given thorough investigation, and special attention is also paid to Newton's Principia. The eighteenth century is presented as primarily a period of the development of calculus, particularly in differential equations and applications of mathematics. Mathematics blossomed in the nineteenth century and the book explores progress in geometry, analysis, foundations, algebra, and applied mathematics, especially celestial mechanics. The approach throughout is markedly historiographic: How do we know what we know? How do we read the original documents? What are the institutions supporting mathematics? Who are the people of mathematics? The reader learns not only the history of mathematics, but also how to think like a historian. The two-volume set was designed as a textbook for the authors' acclaimed year-long course at the Open University. It is, in addition to being an innovative and insightful textbook, an invaluable resource for students and scholars of the history of mathematics. The authors, each among the most distinguished mathematical historians in the world, have produced over fifty books and earned scholarly and expository prizes from the major mathematical societies of the English-speaking world.