Although much has been written of the nature of history and its disciplinary problems, less attention has been paid to the history of thought. M.C. Lemon's rigorously philosophical work first re-asserts the discipline of history in general as narrative based, before pursuing the methodological implications for the history of thought. This original work of scholarship will raise the level of argument in philosophy of history and provoke debate among historians, philosophers, and political t...

Philosophy of History is an essential introduction to a vast body of writing about history, from classical Greece and Rome to the modern world. M.C. Lemon maps out key debates and central concepts of philosophy of history, placing principal thinkers in the context of their times and schools of thought. Lemon explains the crucial differences between speculative philosophy as an enquiry into the content of history, and analytic philosophy of history as relating to ...

Three decades after his landmark work A Night to Remember, Walter Lord revisits the TitanicYears after A Night to Remember stoked the fires of public interest in the doomed RMS Titanic, the clamor for details about April 14, 1912, has not abated. As die-hard professional and amateur historians—“rivet counters,” they are called—puzzle over minute details of the ship’s last hours, a wealth of facts and myth have emerged. Revisiting...

The only book that gets close to defining who Anne Frank was. Her father Otto Frank initiated this project and the author interviewed 42 people mentioned in her diary. Here too is the story of the betrayal and its disastrous aftermath.

We find in the Chronica Maiora of Matthew Paris, a monk of St. Alban's Abbey in the thirteenth century, the story of a Jew who had been doomed, for some insult offered to Christ, to live till the Second Corning. He had heard the story from an Armenian bishop on a visit to England, who said that he had seen the man and talked with him. One of his characteristics was that he was accustomed to tell stories of old times to those who came to see him.I have ventured to use the legend for ...

Political theory professor Stuart Elden explores the history of land ownership and control from the ancient to the modern world in The Birth of Territory.Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territor...

What is intellectual history?Those who practice intellectual history have described themselves as eavesdroppers upon the conversations of the past, explorers of alien ideological worlds, and translators between historic societies and our own, while their critics have often derided them as narrow-mindedly studying the ideas of dead white men. Some consider the discipline to be among the most important in the humanities and social sciences because it facilitates a be...

Gorgi Valentinovitch Plekhanov (1856-1918) was an important Russian Marxist, often cited by Lenin, who was of a generation of young revolutionaries. In this work Plekhanov compares the materialist conception, ie, Marxist, how it happens and how it should be studied human history, with other concepts. The actuality of Plekhanov's reflections is impressive.

Historians in Trouble is investigative journalist and historian Jon Wiener's "incisive and entertaining" (New Statesman, UK) account of several of the most notorious history scandals of the last few years.Focusing on a dozen key controversies ranging across the political spectrum and representing a wide array of charges, Wiener seeks to understand why some cases make the headlines and end careers, while others do not. He looks at the well publicized cases of Micha...

Poverty is South Africa's greatest challenge. But what is 'poverty'? How can it be measured? And how can it be reduced if not eliminated? In South Africa, human science knowledge about the cost of living grew out of colonialism, industrialization, apartheid and civil resistance campaigns, which makes this knowledge far from neutral or apolitical. South Africans have used the Poverty Datum Line (PDL), Gini coefficients and other poverty thresholds to petition the state, to chip away at the ...

In 1840, conflict within the Ottoman Empire gave rise to a serious all-European crisis which led to a diplomatic rupture between France and other Great Powers. The crisis was given the name of the natural frontier which divided France from the rest of Europe: the Rhine. Although the Rhine Crisis did not lead to armed conflict, many states were deeply worried by the unfolding events and by the failure of the peace so carefully negotiated at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Combined with accu...

An in-depth exploration, through his plays and poems, of the philosophy of Shakespeare as a great poet, a great dramatist and a "great mind".Written by a leading Shakespearean scholarDiscusses an array of topics, including sex and gender, politics and political theory, writing and acting, religious controversy and issues of faith, skepticism and misanthropy, and closureExplores Shakespeare as a great poet, a great dramatist and a "great mind"