Authoring the Past: Writing and Rethinking History, edited by Alun Munslow

Book description 

From Amazon:

Please explain why you think about and write history as you do?

Collecting together the responses to this question from 15 of the world’s foremost historians and theorists, Authoring the Past represents a powerful reflection on and intervention in the historiographical field.

Edited by Alun Munslow and presented in concise digestible essays, the collection covers a broad range of contemporary interests and ideas and offers a rich set of reasoned alternative thoughts on our cultural engagement with times gone by. Emerging from an intensely fertile period of historical thought and practice, Authoring the Past examines the variety of approaches to the discipline that have taken shape during this time and suggests possible future ways of thinking about and interacting with the past. It provides a unique insight into recent debates on the nature and purpose of history and demonstrates that when diverse metaphysical and aesthetic choices are made, the nature of the representation of the past becomes a matter of legitimate dispute. Students, scholars and practitioners of history will find it a stimulating and invaluable resource.

Table of contents

Introduction
Alun Munslow

1. Writing, Rewriting the Beach: an Essay
Greg Dening

2. After History
Keith Jenkins

3. History Is Public or Nothing
Alice Kessler-Harris

4. I am not a baseball historian
Steven A. Reiss

5. Beyond History
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth

6. Practices of Historical Narrative
Richard Price

7. More Secondary Modern than Postmodern
Patrick Joyce

8. Rethinking History
Frank Ankersmit

9. Confessions of a Postmodern(?) Historian
Robert A. Rosenstone

10. The Story of My Engagements with the Past
Peter Munz

11. In Search of Ariadne's Thread
Beverley Southgate

12. Invitation to Historians
C. Behan McCullagh

13. An Intellectual Self-Portrait or the Story of a historian
Peter Burke

14. History, the Historian and an Autobiography
Jeremy D. Popkin

15. Invitation to Historians
Alex Macfie

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The Future of History, by Alun Munslow

Book description

From Amazon:

Deploying a range of key concepts such as scepticism, aesthetics, ethics, standpoint, irony, authorship and a new understanding of truth, The Future of History examines history as a form of knowledge, arguing that in the future the multiple forms of its expression will be as significant as its content.

Table of contents

From MacMillan:

Introduction
The Epistemological Problem
What Do Conventional Historians Do?
Multi-Scepticism and History
Relativism, Ethics and Scepticism
Irony
The Modes of Historical Irony
The Ironic Self and History
Standpoint and Subjectivity
Responsibility
Epistomology and Aesthetics
Authorship
Form before Content
Experimental History
Expressionist History
Conclusion
Further Reading

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A History of History, by Alun Munslow

From Amazon.com:

In a provocative analysis of European and American historical thinking and practice since the early 18th century, A History of History confronts several basic assumptions about the nature of history. Among these are the concept of historical realism, the belief in representationalism and the idea that the past possesses its own narrative. What is offered in this book is a far-reaching and fundamental rethinking of realist and representationalist ‘history of a particular kind’ by addressing and explaining the ideas of major philosophers of history over the past three hundred years and those of the key theorists of today. In pursuing this radical analysis, the understanding of history as a narrative is evaluated along with contemporary notions such as the continuing presence of the past and the idea of ‘its lessons’. Written by one of the leading thinkers on the subject, A History of History provides an accessible and radical history of history while offering new insights into the pressing questions of the nature, purpose and function of history. This book is an essential text for all students, teachers and consumers of history.

Table of Contents

From Booktopia.com:

Introduction
The Emergence of Modern Historical Thinking
History as Science
Forms of History Today
History of a Particular Kind and the Rise of the Multi-Sceptic Historian
Refiguring the Past
An Improper Contempt for Proper History
The Presence of the Past
The End of (a) Historical Consciousness (of a Particular Kind)
Conclusion

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