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The Coming of the French Revolution
By Tom Stammers. 2017
Georges Lefebvre was one of the most highly-regarded historians of the 20th century – and a key reason for the…
high reputation he enjoys can be found in The Coming of the French Revolution. Lefebvre's key contribution to the debate over what remains arguably one of history's most contentious and significant events in history was to deploy the critical thinking skill of evaluation to reveal weaknesses in existing arguments about the causes of the Revolution, and analytical skills to expose hidden assumptions in them. Rather than seeing events as driven by the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie – which then lost power to the urban workers – as was usual at the time, Lefebvre deployed years of research in regional archives to argue that the Revolution had had a fourth pillar: the peasantry. Painting the upheaval as complex and multi-layered – while still privileging a predominantly economic interpretation – Lefebvre provides a compelling new narrative to explain why the French monarchy collapsed so suddenly in 1789: one that stressed the significance of a ‘popular revolution’ in the rural countryside.The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
By Riley Quinn. 2017
The end of the Cold War, which occurred early in the 1990s, brought joy and freedom to millions. But it…
posed a difficult question to the world's governments and to the academics who studied them: how would world order be remade in an age no longer dominated by the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism? Samuel P. Huntington was one of the many political scientists who responded to this challenge by conceiving works that attempted to predict the ways in which conflict might play out in the 21st century, and in The Clash of Civilizations he suggested that a new kind of conflict, one centred on cultural identity, would become the new focus of international relations. Huntington's theories, greeted with scepticism when his book first appeared in the 1990s, acquired new resonance after 9/11. The Clash of Civilizations is now one of the most widely-set and read works of political theory in US universities; Huntington's theories have also had a measurable impact on American policy. In large part, this is a product of his problem-solving skills. Clash is a monument to its author's ability to generate and evaluate alternative possibilities and to make sound decisions between them. Huntington's view, that international politics after the Cold War would be neither peaceful, nor liberal, nor cooperative, ran counter to the predictions of almost all of his peers, yet his position – the product of an unusual ability to redefine an issue so as to see it in new ways – has been largely vindicated by events ever since.Reflections on the Revolution in France
By Riley Quinn. 2017
Edmund Burke’s 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France is a strong example of how the thinking skills of analysis…
and reasoning can support even the most rhetorical of arguments. Often cited as the foundational work of modern conservative political thought, Burke’s Reflections is a sustained argument against the French Revolution. Though Burke is in many ways not interested in rational close analysis of the arguments in favour of the revolution, he points out a crucial flaw in revolutionary thought, upon which he builds his argument. For Burke, that flaw was the sheer threat that revolution poses to life, property and society. Sceptical about the utopian urge to utterly reconstruct society in line with rational principles, Burke argued strongly for conservative progress: a continual slow refinement of government and political theory, which could move forward without completely overturning the old structures of state and society. Old state institutions, he reasoned, might not be perfect, but they work well enough to keep things ticking along. Any change made to improve them, therefore, should be slow, not revolutionary. While `Burke’s arguments are deliberately not reasoned in the ‘rational’ style of those who supported the revolution, they show persuasive reasoning at its very best.Cairo in the War: 1939-45
By Artemis Cooper. 2013
For troops in the desert, Cairo meant fleshpots or brass hats. For well-connected officers, it meant polo at the Gezira…
Club and drinks at Shepheard's. For the irregular warriors, Cairo was a city to throw legendary parties before the next mission behind enemy lines. For countless refugees, it was a stopping place in the long struggle home. The political scene was dominated by the British Ambassador Sir Miles Lampson. In February 1942 he surrounded the Abdin Palace with tanks and attempted to depose King Farouk. Five months later it looked as if the British would be thrown out of Egypt for good. Rommel's forces were only sixty miles from Alexandria - but the Germans were pushed back and Cairo life went on. Meanwhile, in the Egyptian Army, a handful of young officers were thinking dangerous thoughts.In Defence of History
By Tom Stammers, Nicholas Piercey. 2017
Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as…
a result of the ‘cultural turn’ taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that, because all texts were the product of biased writers who had incomplete information, none could be privileged above others. In this reading, there could be no objective history, merely the study of the texts themselves. While In Defence of History addresses all aspects of historical method, its key focus is on an extensive evaluation of this postmodern thinking. Evans judges the acceptability of the reasoning advanced by the postmodernists – and finds it badly wanting. He is strongly critical both of the relevance and of the adequacy of their arguments, seeking to show that, ultimately, they are guilty of failing to accept the logic of their own position. All texts are equally valid, or invalid, they suggest – while insisting that the products of their own school are in fact more ‘true’ than those of their opponents. Evans concludes by pointing out that this same argument could be advanced to suggest that the works of Holocaust deniers are just as valid as are those of historians who accept that the Nazis set out to commit genocide. So why, he demands, is no postmodernist willing to say as much? A devastating example of the usefulness of relentless evaluation.The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-Speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel, and Germany
By Zvi Gitelman, Mikhail Krutikov, Stephanie Sandler, Anna Shternshis, Sveta Roberman, Uzi Rebhun, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Adrian Wanner, Nelly Elias, Steven J. Gold, Mark Tolts, Hannah Pollin-Galay, Julia Lerner, Marina Sapritsky, Elena Nosenko-Shtein, Olena Bagno-Moldavski, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Gur Ofer, Yaacov Ro'I. 2016
In 1900 over five million Jews lived in the Russian empire; today, there are four times as many Russian-speaking Jews…
residing outside the former Soviet Union than there are in that region. The New Jewish Diaspora is the first English-language study of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora. This migration has made deep marks on the social, cultural, and political terrain of many countries, in particular the United States, Israel, and Germany. The contributors examine the varied ways these immigrants have adapted to new environments, while identifying the common cultural bonds that continue to unite them. Assembling an international array of experts on the Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish diaspora, the book makes room for a wide range of scholarly approaches, allowing readers to appreciate the significance of this migration from many different angles. Some chapters offer data-driven analyses that seek to quantify the impact Russian-speaking Jewish populations are making in their adoptive countries and their adaptations there. Others take a more ethnographic approach, using interviews and observations to determine how these immigrants integrate their old traditions and affiliations into their new identities. Further chapters examine how, despite the oceans separating them, members of this diaspora form imagined communities within cyberspace and through literature, enabling them to keep their shared culture alive. Above all, the scholars in The New Jewish Diaspora place the migration of Russian-speaking Jews in its historical and social contexts, showing where it fits within the larger historic saga of the Jewish diaspora, exploring its dynamic engagement with the contemporary world, and pointing to future paths these immigrants and their descendants might follow.Imagined Communities
By Jason Xidias. 2017
Benedict Anderson’s 1983 masterpiece Imagined Communities is a ground-breaking analysis of the origins and meanings of “nations” and “nationalism”. A…
book that helped reshape the field of nationalism studies, Imagined Communities also shows the critical thinking skills of interpretation and analysis working at their highest levels. One crucial aspect of Anderson’s work involves the apparently simple act of defining precisely what we mean when we say ‘nation’ or ‘nationalism’ – an interpretative step that is vital to the analysis he proceeds to carry out. For Anderson, it is clear that nations are not ‘natural;’ as historians and anthropologists are well aware, nations as we understand them are a relatively modern phenomenon, dating back only as far as around 1500. But if this is the case, how can we agree what a ‘nation’ is? Anderson’s proposed definition is that they are “imagined communities” – comprising groups of people who regard themselves as belonging to the same community, even if they have never met, and have nothing in common otherwise. The analysis that follows from this insight is all about examining and breaking down the historical processes that helped foster these communities – above all the birth of printing, and the development of capitalism. Brilliantly incisive, Anderson’s analysis shows how good interpretative skills can form the foundations for compelling and original insight.Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fate of Human Societies
By Riley Quinn. 2017
In his 1997 work Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond marshals evidence from five continents and across 13,000 years of…
human history in an attempt to answer the question of why that history unfolded so differently in various parts of the globe. His results offer new explanations for why the unequal divisions of power and wealth so familiar to us today came into existence – and have persisted. Balancing materials drawn from a vast range of sources, addressing core problems that have fascinated historians, anthropologists, biologists and geographers alike – and blending his analysis to create a compelling narrative that became an international best-seller and reached a broad general market – required a mastery of the critical thinking skill of reasoning that few other scholars can rival. Diamond’s reasoning skills allow him to persuade his readers of the value of his interdisciplinary approach and produce well-structured arguments that keep them turning pages even as he refocuses his analysis from one disparate example to another. Diamond adds to that a spectacular ability to grasp the meaning of the available evidence produced by scholars in those widely different disciplines – making Guns, Germs and Steel equally valuable as an exercise in high-level interpretation.Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century
By Ian Jackson. 2017
Few historians can claim to have undertaken historical analysis on as grand a scale as Geoffrey Parker in his 2013…
work Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. It is a doorstop of a book that surveys the ‘general crisis of the 17th century,’ shows that it was experienced practically throughout the world, and was not merely a European phenomenon, and links it to the impact of climate change in the form of the advent of a cold period known as the ‘Little Ice Age.’ Parker’s triumph is made possible by the deployment of formidable critical thinking skills – reasoning, to construct an engaging overall argument from very disparate material, and analysis, to re-examine and understand the plethora of complex secondary sources on which his book is built. In critical thinking, analysis is all about understanding the features and structures of argument: how given reasons lead to conclusions, and what kinds of implicit reasons and assumptions are being used. Historical analysis applies the same skills to the fabric of history, asking how given chains of events occur, how different reasons and factors interact, and so on. Parker, though, takes things further than most in his quest to understand the meaning of a century’s-worth of turbulence spread across the whole globe. Beginning by breaking down the evidence for significant climatic cooling in the 17th-century (due to decreased solar activity), he moves on to detailed study of the effects the cooling had on societies and regimes across the world. From this detailed spadework, he constructs a persuasive argument that accounts for the different ways in which the effects of climate change played out across the century – an argument with profound implications for a future likely to see serious climate change of its own.Common Sense
By Ian Jackson. 2017
Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense has secured an unshakeable place as one of history’s most explosive and revolutionary books. A…
slim pamphlet published at the beginning of the American Revolution, it was so widely read that it remains the all-time best selling book in US history. An impassioned argument for American independence and for democratic government, Common Sense can claim to have helped change the face of the world more than almost any other book. But Paine’s pamphlet is also a masterclass in critical thinking, demonstrating how the reasoned construction of arguments can be reinforced by literary skill and passion. Paine is perhaps more famous as a stylist than as a constructor of arguments, but Common Sense marries the best elements of good reasoning to its polemic. Moving systematically from the origins of government, through a criticism of monarchy, and on to the possibilities for future democratic government in an independent America, Paine neatly lays out a series of persuasive reasons to fight for independence and a new form of government. Indeed, as the pamphlet’s title suggested, to do so was nothing more than ‘common sense.’Discipline and Punish
By Meghan Kallman, Rachele Dini. 2017
Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century’s most innovative thinkers – and his work on Discipline and Punish…
was so original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the book now ranks among the most influential academic works ever published. Foucault’s aim is to trace the way in which incarceration was transformed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. What started as a spectacle, in which ritual punishments were focused on the prisoner’s body, eventually became a matter of the private disciplining of a delinquent soul. Foucault’s work is renowned for its original insights, and Discipline and Punish contains several of his most compelling observations. Much of the focus of the book is on making new connections between knowledge and power, leading Foucault to sketch out a new interpretation of the relationship between voir, savoir and pouvoir – or, ‘to see is to know is to have power.’ Foucault also dwells in fascinating detail on the true implications of a uniquely creative solution to the problems generated by incarcerating large numbers of criminals in a confined space – Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon,’ a prison constructed around a central tower from which hidden guards might – or might not – be monitoring any given prisoner at any given time. As Foucualt points out, the panopticon creates a prison in which inmates will discipline themselves, for fear of punishment, even when there are no guards present. He goes on to apply this insight to the manner in which all of us behave in the outside world – a world in which CCTV and speed cameras are explicitly designed to modify our behavior. Foucault’s highly original vision of prisons also ties them to broader structures of power, allowing him to argue that all previous conceptions of prison are misleading, even wrong. For Foucault, the ultimate purpose of incarceration is neither to punish inmates, nor to reduce crime. It is to produce delinquency as a way of enabling the state to control and of structure crime.Fundamentals of Roman Private Law
By George Mousourakis. 2011
Roman law forms a vital part of the intellectual background of many legal systems currently in force in Continental Europe,…
Latin America, East Asia and other parts of the world. Knowledge of Roman law, therefore, constitutes an essential component of a sound legal education as well as the education of the student of history. This book begins with a historical introduction, which traces the evolution of Roman law from the earliest period of Roman history up to and including Justinian's codification in the sixth century AD. Then follows an exposition of the principal institutions of Roman private law: the body of rules and principles relating to individuals in Roman society and regulating their personal and proprietary relationships. In this part of the book special attention is given to the Roman law of things, which forged the foundations for much of the modern law of property and obligations in European legal systems. Combining a law specialist's informed perspective with a historical and cultural focus, the book provides an accessible source of reference for students and researchers in many diverse fields of legal and historical learning.Gender and the Politics of History
By Pilar Zazueta, Etienne Stockland. 2017
Joan Scott's work has influenced several generations of historians and helped make the topic of gender central to the way…
in which the discipline is taught and studied today. At root a new way of conceptualizing capitalist societies, Scott's theories suggest that gender is better understood as a social construct than as a biological fact. Scott’s original contribution to the debate, however, stems in her use of the critical thinking skill of analysis to understand how the arguments of earlier generations of historians were built in order to fully grasp both their structure and the assumptions that underpinned them. From there, Scott was able to use problem-solving to resolve the issues that emerged from her analysis, asking productive questions focused on better ways to build a model capable of explaining the historical phenomenon of gender difference. Scott answered these questions by introducing models created by deconstructionist scholars – notably Jacques Derrida, who challenged the idea that any term or concept has a stable or dependable meaning rooted in material reality. She was able, in consequence, to refute that idea that gender inequality is the natural (hence justifiable) consequence of biological sexual differences, and issue a fundamental challenge to the capitalist system itself.Letters to My Israeli Sons: The Story of Jewish Survival
By Lynne Reid Banks. 1979
The History of American Sailing Ships
By Howard I. Chapelle. 1935
The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI (The Story of Civilization #6)
By Will Durant. 1957
The Story of the Barbary Pirates (Cornerstones of Freedom)
By R. Conrad Stein. 1982
The Second Stage
By Betty Friedan. 1981
Friedan in her book, says that once past the initial phases of working against injustices, the women's movement should focus…
on working with men to remake private and public planning that work against full lives with children for them.The Renaissance: The Story of Civilization, Volume V (The Story of Civilization #5)
By Will Durant. 1953
An engrossing volume on the Italian Renaissance by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Will Durant. This fifth volume of Durant's acclaimed Story…
of Civilization, The Renaissance chronicles the history of Italy from 1304 to 1576. In this masterful work, readers will encounter: *the poets Petrarch and Boccaccio, the fathers of the Renaissance; *the paintings, sculptures, and architecture of Milan, Florence, and Venice; *the life and accomplishments of Leonardo Da Vinci; *the Catholic church and the popes of Avignon and Rome; *the politicians and philosophers of Italy, including the Borgia family, Julius II, and Machiavelli; *the Italian Wars, the conflicts with France, and the country's decline.Invisible Women of Prehistory: Three Million Years of Peace, Six Thousand Years of War
By Judy Foster, Marlene Derlet. 2013
Based on many years of research into ancient history and prehistory, this insightful tome argues that three million years of…
peace--a period when women's status in society was much higher than it is now--preceded the last 6,000 years of war during which men have come to hold power over women. The book challenges the idea accepted in academia that history is a linear development in which society is steadily moving out of a violent and patriarchal past to a more equitable and peaceful future, and it reexamines both the archaeological work of Marjia Gimbutas and recent research into the prehistories of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia and Oceania.