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Each age has used the debate about the English Reformation in its own way and for its own ends. This book is about the changing nature of the debate on the English Reformation, and is a study of Reformation historiography. It focuses the historiography of the Reformation as seen through the eyes of men who were contemporaries of the English Reformation, and examines the work of certain later writers from Thomas Fuller to John Strype. The book discusses the history of the sixteenth-century Reformation as written by modernist professional historians of the later nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All through the Tudor times the tide of Reformation ebbed and flowed as the monarch willed. The book sets out modern debates concerning the role of Henry VIII, or his ministers, the Reformation and the people of England, and the relative strength of Protestantism or Catholicism. Catholics and Protestants alike openly used the historical past to support their contemporary political arguments. Additionally, the nature of religious identities, and the changes which occurred in the Church of England as a result of the Reformation are also explained. The history of the Reformation in the 1990s and 2000s has to be viewed within the context of research assessment and peer review. The book shows how persistent the threat of postmodernist theory is to the discipline of history, even as leading academic authorities on the Reformation have rejected it out of hand.
Debates on Stalinism gives an up-to-date, concise overview of major debates in the history of Stalinism. It introduces readers to changing approaches since the 1950s, and more broadly to scholarly views on this society reaching back to the 1930s. It argues that writing the history of Stalinism is not only about the Soviet past. It is also centrally shaped by current anxieties and concerns of the scholars studying it. In short, there is a politics of writing the history of Stalinism. Combining biographical investigation of leading historians with thematic and chronological analysis of major topics of study, Debates on Stalinism uncovers the history of these politics. The book provides a snapshot of the state of the field and suggests possible future avenues of further research.
The blossoming of interest in black history since the 1950s was directly linked to the rise of Martin Luther King and the post-Second World War Civil Rights Movement. The advances achieved in desegregation and black voting rights since the 1950s suggested that this was a destination that King's children, and African Americans as a whole, would ultimately reach. In the inter-war years there were indications that some scholars were willing to examine the more depressing realities of black life, most notably in a series of academic studies on lynching. The book discusses the approach of Du Bois to the academic studies on black migrants from a sociological perspective. When African American history began to command more serious attention in the mid-1960s, the generation of historians who had had direct personal experience of the Great Depression and the Second World War began to reach the age of retirement. The book also examines the achievements of race leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power Movement and Black Nationalism of the 1960s. In a 1996 study, political scientist Robert C. Scholarly debate on the African American experience from the 1890s through to the early 1920s gathered momentum with fresh studies on the spread of racial segregation and black migration to the cities. The rise of feminism and popularity of women's history prompted academic researchers to pay attention to the issue of gender in African American history. Stereotyped depictions of African Americans in US popular culture are also discussed.
This book offers an up-to-date survey of historical writing on the German Revolution of 1918–19, focusing on debates during the Weimar, Nazi and Cold War periods, and on developments since German reunification in 1989–90. Its aim is twofold: to make a comprehensive case for seeing the revolution as a landmark event in twentieth-century German, European and world history, and to offer a multi-faceted explanation for its often peripheral place in standard accounts of the recent German past. A central argument is that the ‘cultural turn’ in historical studies from the late 1970s onwards, while shedding important new light on the gendered and spatial dimensions of the revolution, and the role of violence, has failed adequately to grasp its essential political and emancipatory character. Instead, the fragmented narratives that stem from the foregrounding of culture, identity and memory over material factors have merely reinforced the notion of a divided and failed revolution that – for different reasons – characterised pre-1945 and Cold War-era historiography. Public recognition of a handful of reductive ‘lessons’ from the revolution fails to compensate for the absence of real historical debate and sustained, contexualised understanding of how the past relates to the present. The book nonetheless sees some welcome signs of a return to the political in recent urban, transnational and global histories of the revolution, and ends with a plea for more work on the entanglements between the revolution and competing or overlapping ideas about popular sovereignty in the years immediately following the First World War.
This book is about the ways in which the Holocaust has been rendered and represented as History. From court-rooms to history books, efforts to grapple with and award meaning to the genocide of the Jews, in historical terms, have been a consistent feature of post-war intellectual culture and it is these representations that are the subject of the book. The book confronts the first attempts to form historical narratives of the murder of the European Jews per se. It finds a discourse that is as much concerned with the moral politics of judgement in the post-war world as it is with the Shoah. The book also breaks the narrative of the development of the history of the perpetrators. It argues that once it had been created by historians, others began to ask how institutions and individuals external to Nazi-occupied Europe had responded to the Holocaust. Again a divided historiography is uncovered, and again the divisions are as much concerned with what does and does not constitute legitimate historical enquiry as with the issues of responses to the Holocaust themselves. The book further deals with the victims and survivors - who were often excluded from more general Holocaust narratives. An analysis of work on the testimonies of surviving victims finds that debates about how best to use this material are in essence a discourse concerned with the moral possibilities of history-writing.
This book investigates the ways in which the crusades have been observed by historians from the 1090s to the present day. Especial emphasis is placed on the academic after-life of the crusades from the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries. The use of the crusade and its history, by humanists and other contemporary writers, occupied a world of polemic, serving parochial religious, cultural and political functions. Since the Renaissance humanists and Reformation controversialists, one attraction of the crusades had lain in their scope: recruited from all western nations, motivated by apparently transcendent belief systems and fought across three continents. From the perspective of western Europe's engagement with the rest of the globe from the sixteenth century, the crusades provided the only post-classical example to hand of an ideological and military world war. Remarkably, the patterns of analysis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century have scarcely gone away: empathy; disapproval; relevance; the role of religion; materialist reductionism. Despite the explosion of literary attention, behind the empathetic romanticism of Michaud or the criticism of Mills and Scott, the themes identified by Thomas Fuller, Claude Fleury, David Hume, Edward Gibbon and William Robertson persisted. The idea of the crusades as explicit precursors to modern events, either as features of teleological historical progress or as parallels to modern actions remains potent. The combination of ideology, action, change, European conquest and religious fanaticism acted as a contrast or a comparison with the tone of revolutionary and reactionary politics.
The American Revolution of the late eighteenth century, like the earlier mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution and the later French and Russian Revolutions – all featuring or about to feature in this series – were partly civil wars. Any attempt to review the historiography of the American Revolution over more than two centuries is by any estimate presumptuous, foolhardy and overly ambitious, especially when undertaken by a Welsh-born, English and American trained historian who has the privilege of teaching early American history in what was once termed 'one of the dark corners of the land'. The historiography of the American Revolution is vast and any attempt to grapple with it requires tough choices to be made over what to put in rather than what consciously to leave out. The author adopts a thematic structure which reflects the changing historiography of the Revolution. The book deals with the explosion of new work from the mid-1960s onwards but their starting point is the original historiography when the subjects of these chapters – African Americans, women and Native Americans – were first included in histories of the Revolution. This entails some overlap in the subject matter of some chapters but not in their historiographical treatment. As late as 1976 Alfred Young's ground breaking collection of essays The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism – which included essays on African Americans, women and Native Americans – caused one reviewer to refer to their presence as 'incongruous'.
This book sets the context for a detailed exploration of the academic debate about the origins of the British empire, and outlines and engages with a key interpretation or approach to the subject. It gives a brief outline of the growth of the empire from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, together with a survey of various theoretical explanations and justifications offered by commentators from the early mercantilists, to apologist historians of the late Victorian period such as Froude and Seeley. The book considers more closely the problems surrounding the concept of imperialism, and its many definitions. It also considers why the British among the various continental European empires, has attracted so much interest and controversy among historians. The White Dominions, particularly Canada, Australia and New Zealand were the beneficiaries of such liberal concession, which was granted on the assumption that the predominantly white and British inhabitants of these colonies needed and deserved the right of self government. It is unsurprising, therefore, given the kaleidoscopic quality of the British empire, its ethnic and cultural diversity and the baffling varieties of its formal and informal rule, that historians of imperialism have come to regard it as the richest source of insights into the subject. It has become a testing ground for theoretical models of imperialism, a function it seems likely to continue to serve.
Few upheavals in any country's history have been more momentous, dislodging and controversial than the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. It divided France and Europe at the time and has gone on divisively reverberating ever since. The Revolution's impact on France is indelible; it permanently changed the country. This book demonstrates the complex events and trends of the French Revolution and the different ways in which they have been interpreted and judged. It deals with the various types of revolutionary history and the various schools of historical thought on the Revolution. The structure of the book is similar to the other books in the Issues in Historiography series. The book is not an anthology or reader, or a history of the Revolution. Rather, it is a history of histories and focuses on those individuals who are generally perceived to be the 'major' or 'preeminent' figures within revolutionary historiography. There is a surprising degree of consensus on this matter. But the book delves into some obscure areas, and considers some of the 'minor' figures as well. In each chapter the aim is the same: to unpack the ideas of the key historians, to discover what they said about the Revolution and how they said it. The book then deals with a tranche of nineteenth-century historians: those who put forward epic, idealist and romantic interpretations and those who responded to the dawn of the Third Republic by revisiting the events of 1789 and the revolutionary decade.
This book examines the historiography of the African American freedom struggle from the 1890s to the present. It considers how, and why, the study of African American history developed from being a marginalized subject in American universities and colleges at the start of the twentieth century to become one of the most extensively researched areas in American history today. There is analysis of the changing scholarly interpretations of African American leaders from Booker T. Washington through to Barack Obama. The impact and significance of the leading civil rights organizations are assessed, as well as the white segregationists who opposed them and the civil rights policies of presidential administrations from Woodrow Wilson to Donald Trump. The civil rights struggle is also discussed in the context of wider political, social and economic changes in the United States and developments in popular culture.