When I studied Shakespeare’s works as an undergraduate, I became intrigued by the questions of why and how we got to the point where Shakespeare’s name is recognised all over the world, his plays are quoted in everyday conversation, and his works are central to every English Literature course. I’ve pursued these questions in my academic research, where I look at the history of Shakespeare in performance, but also at how these performances are remembered in souvenirs, pictures, and objects.
Barbara Hodgdon’s sensitive, thoughtful, and often funny writing about how we remember Shakespeare's performances was one of the main reasons I wanted to explore this topic; her essay "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Still" shaped my thinking about Shakespeare's photography. This book reflects on her lifetime of theatregoing and puts personal memories and souvenirs into conversation with other kinds of records – photographs, sketches, prompt books, and props. In the process she explores the relationship between rehearsal, performance, and archives. Her approach is consciously playful, acknowledging the role of the imagination in the workings of memory.
Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive is a ground-breaking and movingly written exploration of what remains when actors evacuate the space and time of performance. An analysis of 'leftovers', it moves between tracking the politics of what is consciously archived and the politics of visible and invisible theatrical labour to trace the persistence of performance.
In this fascinating volume, Hodgdon considers how documents, material objects, sketches, drawings and photographs explore scenarios of action and behaviour - and embodied practices. Rather than viewing these leftovers as indexical signs of a theatrical past, Hodgdon argues that the work they do is neither strictly…
In my novels, I aim to present a different vision of early Post-Roman Britain than the one usually imagined in fiction – especially in the future Kingdom of Kent, where my books are set. To show these connections, and to present the greater background for the events in the novels, I first needed to gain knowledge of what Europe itself looked like in this period: a Gaul divided between Gothic, Frankish, and Roman administration, a complex interplay of Romans and Barbarians, a world in transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The story gleaned from the pages of these books proved as fascinating and intriguing as any I’ve ever read.
Herwig Wolfram is the Grand Master of Germanic history. His mighty History of the Goths is a work cited perhaps more than any other by any author writing about this period, and its influence of study of Early Middle Ages is unparalleled. But History of the Goths is a heavy, dense, scholarly work, and not easy to find these days. The Roman Empire is a more popular synthesis, focusing not just on Goths, but on all Late Antiquity Germanic tribes – Franks, Burgundians, Saxons, and others – providing a rich view of the barbarians from the perspective of their Roman neighbours.
The names of early Germanic warrior tribes and leaders resound in songs and legends; the real story of the part they played in reshaping the ancient world is no less gripping. Herwig Wolfram's panoramic history spans the great migrations of the Germanic peoples and the rise and fall of their kingdoms between the third and eighth centuries, as they invaded, settled in, and ultimately transformed the Roman Empire. As Germanic military kings and their fighting bands created kingdoms, and won political and military recognition from imperial governments through alternating confrontation and accommodation, the 'tribes' lost their shared culture and social…
I am a professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College and the author ofThe Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784-1860. What has always fascinated me about history is how differently it can be interpreted by different people, even when looking at the exact same subject. While I write and teach on a variety of topics, ranging from the American Revolution to historiography, all of my courses and research deal in some way with the conflicts over how to represent the past that have divided both historians and the general public throughout the long history of history as a subject.
An old book, but still one of the best accounts of 19th-century American historical writing, showing how Romantic historians like William Prescott and Francis Parkman viewed history as a literary art. As Levin elegantly and lucidly demonstrates, these historians did not view themselves as mere chroniclers of fact but considered themselves artists whose purpose was to bring the past to life through the use of their own imagination. This was one of the first works of historiography that I read, and it is still a model to me of how to approach the subject.
I’m an Irish writer and historian. I always enjoyed history, even in school, and I went on to study it at Maynooth University, receiving a BA. I became a history teacher and eventually head of the history department in Méanscoil Iognáid Rís. I began writing local history articles for the Dunlavin arts festival and the parish magazine. I went back to university and got a first-class honours MA from Maynooth, before being awarded a PhD from DCU. I’ve won the Lord Walter Fitzgerald prize and the Irish Chiefs’ Prize, and my students were winners in the Decade of Centenaries competition. Now retired, I continue to write and lecture about history!
I chose this short book because it casts light on a hidden history—that of faction fighting. Contrary to widespread belief, factions were not confined to rural areas in Ireland, nor were they a wholly nineteenth-century phenomenon. Kelly’s book provides a detailed account of the development of factions in eighteenth-century Dublin, from the Kevan Bail to the Ormond and Liberty Boys (and other little-known factions), and vividly describes the periodic disorder associated with them as they tried to establish control in the city. Kelly also outlines how the city’s economic and demographic growth led to the social conditions which nurtured factionalism, and he traces changes in the nature of factionalism as the eighteenth century progressed. An enthralling read about a topic that has often gone under the historiographical radar!
Compared with organised agrarian protest, factional disorder (rural and urban) in eighteenth-century Ireland has escaped close scrutiny. The Ormond and Liberty Boys have achieved a considerable measure of renown but the picture of them available to date is misleading and incomplete. The object of this study is to set the Liberty and Ormond Boys in their contemporary context. The conditions necessary to enable factions to develop and flourish in Dublin were in place by the 1720s, when the city was sufficiently developed physically and demographically to sustain the local and sectoral identities that faction required. Nonetheless, the growth of faction…
For as long as I can remember, I have been deeply interested in how people understand and use the past. Whether it is a patient reciting a personal account of his or her past to a therapist or a scholar writing a history in many volumes, I find that I am consistently fascinated by the importance and different meanings we assign to what has gone before us. What I love about Herodotus is that he reveals something new in each reading. He has a profound humanity that he brings to the genre that he pretty much invented. And to top it all off, he is a great storyteller!
There are many books about Herodotus, but John Gould’s book remains the best introduction even after thirty years. It appeared in the series Historians on Historians, and Gould approaches history with an eye for what is distinct and unique in Herodotus’s work.
There are excellent chapters on how Herodotus narrates his history, his views on religion and causation, and many other important aspects of the work. I like that, in contrast to earlier treatments of Herodotus (which often had a condescending attitude), Gould is sympathetic to what Herodotus was trying to accomplish, though, at the same time, he maintains a critical distance towards the author and his work.
This text brings new approaches to Herodotus' sources and to his methods of collecting information, to the logic of his narrative and to his understanding of human behaviour. Drawing on recent advances in the understanding or oral tradition, the author takes issue with a number of theories about Herodotus' historical thinking. Herodotus as a story teller, he argues, does not preclude Herodotus as a historian; reciprocity is central to his method; Herodotos' declared subject, the Persian Wars, is itself Herodotus' own construct, embodied in the form of continuous narrative derived from a mass of local and family traditions that reach…
I’ve been trying to understand people’s politics since I was a kid and wondered why my dad, who had been a boy in Sicily under Mussolini, spoke so fondly of “il Duce”—even though Dad was an otherwise independent thinker who believed in people’s inherent dignity, not to mention a man who was an immigrant and an outsider and thus exactly the kind of person fascists hate. I think this background partially explains why I focus my writing on interpreting the significance and appeal of widespread and, in some cases, morally indefensible and contradictory cultural-political ideologies such as neoliberalism and racism.
Fascism always holds out a promise of belonging to the tribe, the race, and, most importantly, the nation. Lepore’s very short and beautifully readable history of the US explicitly rejects the right-wing and fascist assumption that the nation and nationalism are theirs.
This America retells US history from the perspective that the country has not lived up to its promises of equality, but the first step to making that happen is acknowledging its painful history. The book contextualizes the invocations of some of its greatest critics, such as DuBois, Douglass, and Baldwin, in their clear-eyed pronouncements of the United States’ failures of justice and democracy.
Lepore’s hope rests on the belief that a pluralistic, truly democratic United States is possible if Americans own the nation’s failures to live up to its stated standards and commit to the painful work of holding ourselves and the structures of civic life accountable to…
At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths.
With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history-and the history of the idea of the nation itself-while calling for a "new Americanism": a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America's past.
Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how…
I am a professor who holds a Ph.D. in American history. I researched several archives in the United States and Paris, France to write this book and I am very proud of it. I was inspired to write this story mainly from listening to the friends of my parents, when I was younger, who went to war in Vietnam and came back broken yet committed to making the world a better place. The kindness they showed me belied the stories they shared of their harrowing experiences and I wanted to understand how this divergence happened in men that rarely spoke of their past.
Rothberg is not a historian but I love what he accomplished with this scholarly book. He examines film, literature, and paintings to suggest that our memories are multidirectional: meaning they often move in different directions at the same time. This allows him to place the holocaust side-by-side the colonial/decolonial project and produce a devastating story of how each fed upon the other. For example, he looks at moments in 1960s Paris that places Jewish survivors of Auschwitz in conversation with Algerian survivors of French concentration camps during the Algerian war to suggest their memories could work together to produce an honest remembrance of the past. I try to do something similar in my own book by illustrating how the war dead could link domestic and foreign places together in building an American Empire.
Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a twofold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of decolonization. On the one hand, it demonstrates how the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time that it has been declared "unique" among human-perpetrated horrors. On the other, it uncovers the more surprising and seldom acknowledged fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in part thanks to postwar events that seem at…
We live in an increasingly connected world. But human beings have
always made connections with one another across space, and the space I
find especially exciting is water - whether the narrow space of seas
such as the Mediterranean and the Baltic, or the broader and wilder
spaces of the great oceans. These are spaces that link distant
countries and continents, across which people have brought objects,
ideas and religions as well as themselves - a history of migrants,
merchants, mercenaries, missionaries, and many others that can be
recovered from shipwrecks, travellers' tales, cargo manifests, and many
other sources, a history, ultimately, of the origins of our globalized
world.
John Elliott is a world-class historian of Spain and its Empire, his reflections on how to write history without becoming immersed in jargon or obscure theories are beautifully woven into the story of how he himself learned the craft of writing clear, accessible, and original works of history, taking the reader from Cambridge to Franco’s Spain. This is a charming book with a valuable message.
An eminent historian offers rare insight into his craft and the way it has changed over his lifetime
From the vantage point of nearly sixty years devoted to research and the writing of history, J. H. Elliott steps back from his work to consider the progress of historical scholarship. From his own experiences as a historian of Spain, Europe, and the Americas, he provides a deft and sharp analysis of the work that historians do and how the field has changed since the 1950s.
The author begins by explaining the roots of his interest in Spain and its past, then…
Trouillot's "Silencing the Past" is another book that I've been reading for over twenty years. Beautifully written, and with a compelling argument about how silences permeate the archive at every level and thus distort the kinds of history that can be told, Trouillot's text turned my world upside down when I first read it back in 2002. As he expertly takes us through how Columbus Day, the Alamo, and Sans Souci (the man and the palace in Haiti) find their place in history, and are (mis)remembered, or commemorated differently according to place and time, he peels back the layers of power in the archives. And he does so in clear and compelling prose that makes this book impossible to put down. Perhaps the most brilliant innovation is Trouillot's clear demonstration of the dynamics at play between "what happened" and "what is said to have happened." I don't think it is…
Now part of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck
The 20th anniversary edition of a pioneering classic that explores the contexts in which history is produced—now with a new foreword by renowned scholar Hazel Carby
Placing the West’s failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution—the most successful slave revolt in history—alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.
This modern classic resides at the intersection of history, anthropology, Caribbean, African-American, and post-colonial studies, and…
I grew up in the Soviet Union, where being Jewish had no intellectual or religious substance. My discovery of Judaism and Jewish history happened after my emigration, when I was already an adult. This helps me to relate to audiences and readers who are not Jewish. For example, a Japanese translation of my book on Jewish opposition to Zionism earned a place on a bestseller list in Japan, where hardly any Jews live. In the course of my university career, I have explained events in Israel in electronic and printed media on the five continents where I also have taught as a visiting professor.
It always intrigued me how Zionism as a political movement and Israel as its embodiment can claim to act on behalf of the Jewish people. Sand brilliantly explains that the specific conditions of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe, particularly discrimination and violent outbursts (pogroms), produced a sense of nationhood.
As a historian, I am fascinated by Sand’s account of Zionist ideologues from that part of the world manufacturing powerful myths, which have buttressed the new Israeli identity even among Jews transplanted to Israel from Asia and Africa, where this kind of Jewish nationalism had been virtually unknown.
A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.
