How is knowledge measured? How long does it take us to reflect on something and how long to express our thoughts? Such is the dilemma that the human, social and economic sciences go through, since they face the challenge of understanding complex processes when confronting the urgency of standards, measurements and forms of qualitative and quantitative evaluation that respond to notions of utility, productivity and viability, defined within social, cultural and political realities discordan...

This book provides a critical history of the movement associated with the journal Annales, from its foundation in 1929 to the present. This movement has been the single most important force in the development of what is sometimes called ‘the new history’.Renowned cultural historian, Peter Burke, distinguishes between four main generations in the development of the Annales School. The first generation included Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who fought against the old historical estab...

What is the history of knowledge? This engaging and accessible introduction explains what is distinctive about the new field of the history of knowledge (or, as some scholars say, ‘knowledges in the plural’) and how it differs from the history of science, intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge or from cultural history. Leading cultural historian, Peter Burke, draws upon examples of this new kind of history from different periods and from the history of India, East Asia and the Is...

Peter Burke follows up his magisterial Social History of Knowledge, picking up where the first volume left off around 1750 at the publication of the French Encyclopédie and following the story through to Wikipedia. Like the previous volume, it offers a social history (or a retrospective sociology of knowledge) in the sense that it focuses not on individuals but on groups, institutions, collective practices and general trends.The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argu...

The connoisseur has been an influential, if somewhat mysterious, figure in the history of art, responsible for making or breaking high-profile collections and reputations and influencing taste, the art market and the field of art history with their pronouncements. But what did it take to become a connoisseur, and how reliable were the great connoisseurs of previous centuries? With the advent of scientific techniques and artificial intelligence, what future is there for expertise based on t...

The first three editions of this bestselling book have established A Social History of the Media as a classic, providing a masterful overview of communication media and of the social and cultural contexts within which they emerged and evolved over time.This fourth edition has been revised and updated throughout to reflect the latest developments in the field. Additionally, an expanded introduction explores the wide range of secondary literature and theory that inform the s...

In Celebrated Naval and Military Trials, Peter Burke assembles and interprets notable court-martial proceedings and related cases from Britain's naval and military history, revealing how law, discipline, honor, and political power converged in moments of crisis. The volume belongs to the nineteenth-century documentary tradition of historical compilation, combining narrative commentary with legal and military detail. Its style is sober, exacting, and evidentiary, yet often dramatic, since t...

In this book Peter Burke adopts a socio-cultural approach to examine the changes in the organization of knowledge in Europe from the invention of printing to the publication of the French Encyclopédie.The book opens with an assessment of different sociologies of knowledge from Mannheim to Foucault and beyond, and goes on to discuss intellectuals as a social group and the social institutions (especially universities and academies) which encouraged or discouraged intellectua...

Cultural history has in the last few decades come to the fore of historical research into early modern Europe. Due in no small part to Peter Burke’s pioneering work, the tools of the cultural historian are now routinely applied to every aspect of history, transforming our understanding of the past.First published in 1978, this study examines the broad sweep of pre-industrial Europe's popular culture. From the world of the professional entertainer to the songs, stories, rituals and ...

The Art of Conversation is a major contribution to the social history of language - a relatively new field which has become the focus of lively interdisciplinary debate in recent years.Drawing on the work of sociolinguists and others, Burke uses their concept while reserving the right to qualify their theories where the historical record makes this seem appropriate. Like the sociolinguists, Burke in concerned with the way language varies according to who is communicating t...

The Low-Tech, No-Grow-Lights Approach to Abundant HarvestYear-Round Indoor Salad Gardening offers good news: with nothing more than a cupboard and a windowsill, you can grow all the fresh salad greens you need for the winter months (or throughout the entire year) with no lights, no pumps, and no greenhouse.Longtime gardener Peter Burke was tired of the growing season ending with the first frost, but due to his busy work schedule and family life, di...

The period in which we live is marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters of all kinds. However we react to it, the global trend towards mixing or hybridization is impossible to miss, from curry and chips – recently voted the favourite dish in Britain – to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu, ‘Bollywood’ films or salsa or reggae music. Some people celebrate these phenomena, whilst others fear or condemn them. No wonder, then, that theorists such as Homi Bhabha, ...