Showing papers in "The History Teacher in 1994"

History and Social Theory.

Abstract: * Preface *1 THEORISTS AND HISTORIANS * A Dialogue of the Deaf * The Differentiation of History and Theory * The Dismissal of the Past * The Rise of Social History * The Convergence of Theory and History *2 MODELS AND METHODS * Comparisons * Models * Quantitative Methods * The Social Microscope *3 CENTRAL CONCEPTS * Roles and Performances * Sex and Gender * Family and Kinship * Communities and Identities * Class and Status * Social Mobility and Social Distinction * Consumption and Exchange * Social and Cultural Capital * Patrons and Clients * Power and the Public Sphere * Centres and Peripheries * Hegemony and Resistance * Social Protest and Social Movements * Mentalities, Ideologies, Discourses * Communication and Reception * Postcolonialism and Cultural Hybridity * Orality and Textuality * Memory and Myth *4 CENTRAL PROBLEMS * Rationality versus Relativism * Concepts of Culture * Consensus versus Conflict * Facts versus Fictions * Structures versus Agents * Functionalism * The Example of Venice * Structuralism * The Return of the Actor *5 SOCIAL THEORY AND SOCIAL CHANGE * Spencera s Model * Marxa s Model * A Third Way? * Essays in Synthesis * Patterns of Population * Patterns of Culture * Encounters * The Importance of Events * Generations *6 POSTMODERNITY AND POSTMODERNISM * Destabilization * Cultural Constructions * Decentering * Beyond Eurocentrism? * Globalization * To Conclude * Bibliography * Index

Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: Nowadays medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the "two cultures" divide. This was not so in the 18th century when doctors, scientists, writers and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite and often collaborated with each other. Physicians like Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets; novelists such as Tobias Smollett were medically qualified. This close interplay of medicine and literature in the Age of Enlightenment was evident in literary ideas and expression. Debates raged as to whether writing was itself therapeutic, or possibly a disease; and poets and novelists for their part drew heavily on medical language and learning for their models of human nature, of the action of the emotions and the dialetic of body and psyche. Written by both medical historians and literary critics, this book takes up these themes, with particular attention to questions of body language and the representation of the inner life. The essays include an analysis of dreams and the unconscious, and a discussion of the medical theories concerning the prolongation of life.

Technology, pessimism, and postmodernism

Abstract: This collection of essays from international scholars from various disciplines addresses the theme of technological pessimism, the conviction that technology has given us the means not only to achieve unlimited progress, but to destroy ourselves and our most cherished values.

Sigmund Freud and Maurice Halbwachs: The Problem of Memory in Historical Psychology*

Abstract: SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939) is well-remembered by historians of this generation, but their memories of him are ambivalent. Few scholars today would claim to take Freud's practical work as an historian seriously. His famous study of the origins of civilization, Totem and Taboo (1913), has long since been dismissed as conjectural and refuted by more recent scholarship.1 Yet for most psychohistorians, he is still the grand master for his pioneering model, the point of departure from which they have proceeded in developing this field.2 Nor have historians generally rejected the value of psychoanalytical technique in historical research. Peter Gay for one has shown its enduring value in the ensemble of considerations historians must entertain in their search for a comprehensive understanding of the past.3 Here I wish to take a different tack. I want to evaluate Freud as historian in light of the enormous recent interest in the role of collective memory in historical understanding. To consider Freud's theory from the vantage point of memory illuminates his theory of history in a different way. Indeed, one might argue that Freud's theory of history turns on his theory of memory. In this respect, I wish to judge his interest in history in light of two historiographical perspectives on the memory/history problem.

Bushid6 or Bull? A Medieval Historian's Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition

Abstract: It would be difficult to find any facet of Japan's cultural heritage that exercises as powerful a hold on the world's popular imagination as the samurai.1 For the most part, the image of the samurai and the tradition he represents is positive. Japanese warriors are the heroes of movies, TV shows, and novels, and the role models for hundreds of thousands of martial arts students around the globe. But for many among the generation that fought Japan in the Pacific War, for much of the political left in Japan, and especially for many of the peoples and governments of the lands that were occupied by Japan in the course of the war, the legacy of the samurai also has its sinister side. The samurai tradition is often cited as the source of both the mind-set that launched Japan's war against China, Southeast Asia and the United States and of the norms and values of the soldiers and officers who fought it. Both are said to have been conditioned by and derived from an ancient code of warrior behavior called bushid---literally, the "Way of the Warrior." In the words of military historian Arthur Swinson:

History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices

Abstract: Reading is a hobby to open the knowledge windows. Besides, it can provide the inspiration and spirit to face this life. By this way, concomitant with the technology development, many companies serve the e-book or book in soft file. The system of this book of course will be much easier. No worry to forget bringing the history from south africa alternative visions and practices critical perspectives on the past book. You can open the device and get the book by on-line.

Vietnam documents : American and Vietnamese views of the war

Abstract: This handbook covers the widest possible range of organizational misbehaviors (age, race, and gender discrimination, abuse, bullying, aggression, violence, fraud and corruption), all with an eye toward the effects on individual and organizational health and well-being. It is the first-ever single-source resource on this important topic.

Gender at the Base of World History.

Abstract: GENDER IS ONE FUNDAMENTAL organizing principle of human societies. As such, it should be integral to world history survey coursesas basic as economic systems, growth of cities and states, trade, conquest, or religion. Students need to learn about the changing and various distinctions of gender that have divided the lives of women and men from prehistory to the modern period. Pervasive assumptions that women have always kept house and cared for children should yield to knowledge about women's productive labor in gathering and growing crops, in weaving textiles in homes and factories, in marketing, and in providing essential social services. Considering gender reveals critical differences in the family foundations of societies-varying from how marriages were contracted and ancestry calculated to how property was transferred and classes formed. That women had no public role in classical Athens is relevant to democratic theory and to understanding why American women's demand for voting rights was ridiculed before 1920. Whether considering religion, literacy, health, art, slavery, war, or trade, gender usually mattered and to teach world history accurately, we need to explore this and explain how it mattered. Judith Zinsser, in History and Feminism: A Glass Half Full, points out that it has been nearly twenty years since women historians called for systematic analysis of gender relationships as a "fundamental category of

The Renaissance Depression Debate: The View From England

Abstract: FOR MORE THAN FOUR CENTURIES, historians of England have depicted the century and a half after the Black Death as a period defined overwhelmingly by its failures: failure to win the war with France; failure to find a solution to the political contest between Yorkists and Lancastrians; and failure to check the corruption of a church preoccupied with persecuting Lollards. Over the course of the present century, scholarly interest in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has shifted away from war and politics and towards the economy and society, but on the whole, economic historians have been no kinder to the period than their forerunners in other fields. When, in 1962, Roberto Lopez and Harry Miskimin included England in their argument for a European-wide "Renaissance depression," they echoed what many English economic historians were saying about their country's past economic performance.' In the quarter-century since the Lopez and Miskimin article appeared, much has been published on the late medieval economy, including more expansive works on the subject by Miskimin himself.2 Most of the work related to England has subscribed, at least implicitly, to the depression thesis. There have been a few fairly strenuous efforts to rehabilitate the period, most notably by A. R. Bridbury, but the majority view among economic historians continues to be that a prolonged depression in total economic output occurred in the fifteenth century.3

Cross-Cultural Trade as a Framework for Teaching World History: Concepts and Applications.

Abstract: THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON that my world history students have' taught me during the past ten years is that if my course is to work, it must be conceptually clear. "There is so much information to learn in this course," they tell me. And, they are right. There is, inevitably, a lot of information for students to absorb in a course in global history. In addition, I know that despite my best efforts at coherence, my course does at times seem to be little more than the story of "one damn thing after another." How to avoid suffocating my students in an avalanche of facts? To me, this is the great challenge presented by the world history