This essay—a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on contextualism—is concerned with the gradual rise of awareness of the existence of modes of thought or systems of belief that are different from those that are dominant in one's own culture. The awareness can be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but was developed further in the early to mid-twentieth century. Its main consequence has been to encourage individuals to distance themselves from their own system—to criticize and change it.

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities which appear to be timeless - gathering knowledge, analysing, disseminating and employing it - are in fact time-bound and take different forms in different periods and places. The second part tries to counter the tendency to write a triumphalist history of the 'growth' of knowledge by discussing losses of knowledge and the price of specialization. The third part offers geographical, sociological and chronological overviews, contrasting the experience of centres (...) and peripheries and arguing that each of the main trends of the period - professionalization, secularization, nationalization, democratization, etc, coexisted and interacted with its opposite."--Publisher. (shrink)

The second edition of What is Cultural History? will continue to be an essential textbook for all students of history as well as those taking courses in ...

This essay, published originally in 2002, is reprinted in “Contextualism—The Next Generation: Symposium on the Future of a Methodology,” because of its impact on the thinking that informs and has led to this new symposium. Burke's argument is that the term context has become “an intellectual slogan or shibboleth” and that “there is a price to pay” for its “more and more frequent use... in a number of disciplines—among them, anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, intellectual history, law, linguistics, literary criticism, (...) philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, and theology.” A brief history of the uses of the term and its cognates in these disciplines is provided, along with an examination of “recent interest in the phenomenology of recontextualism or ‘reframing,’” which “depends on agency, creativity, and the power to adapt” and which, indeed, almost defines what is meant by “originality, innovation, invention, or creativity.” The essay concludes that context ought to be used mainly in the plural to indicate that no topic is properly interpretable in any single framework. (shrink)

Since its first publication in 1992, _New Perspectives on Historical Writing_ has become a key reference work used by students and researchers interested in the most important developments in the methodology and practice of history. For this new edition, the book has been thoroughly revised and updated and includes an entirely new chapter on environmental history. Peter Burke is joined here by a distinguished group of internationally renowned historians, including Robert Darnton, Ivan Gaskell, Richard Grove, Giovanni Levi, Roy Porter, Gwyn (...) Prins, Joan Scott, Jim Sharpe, Richard Tuck, and Henk Wesseling. The contributions examine a wide range of interdisciplinary areas of historical research, including women’s history, history "from below," the history of reading, oral history, the history of the body, microhistory, the history of events, the history of images, and political history. (shrink)

A remarkable amount of the most innovative, significant, and lasting historical writing of the twentieth century has been produced in France, much of it the work of a group of historians associated with the journal Annales. Founded in 1929, Annales promoted a new kind of history based on three central aims: to substitute a problem-orientated analytical history for a traditional narrative of events; to embrace the history of the whole range of human activities rather than concentrate on political history; and, (...) in order to achieve the first two aims, to collaborate fully with other disciplines - notably geography, sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, and anthropology. The critical history describes, analyzes, and evaluates the achievements of the Annales school, combining chronological and thematic approaches. The author distinguishes three generations in the history of the Annales movement. In the first phase, from the 1920's to 1945, the movement was small, radical, and subverse, fighting a guerrilla action against traditional political history and the history of events. Its leaders, and the founders of Annales, were Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. After the Second World War, the movement's rebels took over the historical establishment. During this second phase, which lasted until about 1968, the movement was most nearly a school, with distinctive concepts and methods, and was presided over by the towering figure of Fernand Braudel. The third phase of the movement, which continues today, is marked by fragmentation. Its influence in France had become so great that it lost much of its distinctiveness, and no strong figures appeared to give the movement the inspiration and direction that Febvre, Bloch, and Braudel had provided. Some members of the group even returned to political history and to the narrative of events. The cycle was complete - the rebels became the establishment and were in turn rebelled against. (shrink)

Analysis of editions of classical historians-both in original and vernacular languages-as given in F.L.A. Schweiger's Handbuch der classischen Bibliographie, indicates variations in taste for models of historical writing. Many more Roman than Greek historians were reprinted: Sallust was the most popular author, but almost all the Romans were reprinted more often than any of the Greeks. National preferences can be seen in statistics of vernacular editions arranged by place of publication. Scholarly readers show a different pattern of preference. Introductions to (...) editions often reveal the social groups to whom the book is expected to appeal, and show qualities particularly admired. (shrink)

A new edition of this best-selling collection of essays by leading experts on historical methodology. Since its first publication in 1992, _New Perspectives on Historical Writing_ has become a key reference work used by students and researchers interested in the most important developments in the methodology and practice of history. For this new edition, the book has been thoroughly revised and updated and includes an entirely new chapter on environmental history. Peter Burke is joined here by a distinguished group of (...) internationally renowned historians, including Robert Darnton, Ivan Gaskell, Richard Grove, Giovanni Levi, Roy Porter, Gwyn Prins, Joan Scott, Jim Sharpe, Richard Tuck, and Henk Wesseling. The contributions examine a wide range of interdisciplinary areas of historical research, including women's history, history "from below," the history of reading, oral history, the history of the body, microhistory, the history of events, the history of images, and political history. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with one aspect of the European antiquarian movement of the seventeenth century. Like the humanist movement out of which it developed, antiquarianism was originally text-centered. However, in the course of time the antiquaries became more and more interested in the material culture of the past. This article adopts a comparative approach to the study of what might be called the "three antiquities," classical, Christian, and barbarian, and focuses on the question of evidence, especially on what the (...) scholars of the time considered to be reliable evidence. (shrink)

Since its first publication in 1992, _New Perspectives on Historical Writing_ has become a key reference work used by students and researchers interested in the most important developments in the methodology and practice of history. For this new edition, the book has been thoroughly revised and updated and includes an entirely new chapter on environmental history. Peter Burke is joined here by a distinguished group of internationally renowned historians, including Robert Darnton, Ivan Gaskell, Richard Grove, Giovanni Levi, Roy Porter, Gwyn (...) Prins, Joan Scott, Jim Sharpe, Richard Tuck, and Henk Wesseling. The contributions examine a wide range of interdisciplinary areas of historical research, including women’s history, history "from below," the history of reading, oral history, the history of the body, microhistory, the history of events, the history of images, and political history. (shrink)

In social psychology, we need to establish a general theory of the self, which can attend to both macro and micro processes, and which avoids the redundancies of separate theories on different aspects of the self. For this purpose, we present core components of identity theory and social identity theory and argue that although differences exist between the two theories, they are more differences in emphasis than in kind, and that linking the two theories can establish a more fully integrated (...) view of the self. The core components we examine include the different bases of identity (category/group or role) in each of the theories, identity salience and the activation of identities as discussed in the theories, and the cognitive and motivational processes that emerge from identities based on category/group and on role. By examining the self through the lens of both identity theory and social identity theory, we see how, in combination, they can move us toward a general theory of the self. (shrink)

In contributing to this symposium on book history, I was asked to reflect on my ASocialHistoryofKnowledge (hereafter SHK), which was published in 2000, describing how I came to write it and what has happened to the field since, and considering the question of whether I might write my essay differently if I were beginning it today. Following this, I shall devote the remainder of the article to a sketch for a future project on the history of knowledge.

An anthology of responses to the ideas of Michel Foucault. These responses are concentrated in the English world, but they try to reveal the full range of reaction and to assess Foucault's achievement and his place in intellectual history.

This volume is a tribute to one of England's greatest living historians, Sir Keith Thomas, by distinguished scholars who have been his pupils. They describe the changing meanings of civility and civil manners since the sixteenth century. They show how the terms were used with respect to different people - women, the English and the Welsh, imperialists, and businessmen - and their effects in fields as varied as sexual relations, religion, urban politics, and private life.

This article is concerned with history that is fuzzy in the sense of impressionistic rather than systematic, using “soft” rather than “hard” data and concerned more with “lumping” than with “splitting.” It argues that there have been at least four phases in the two centuries of conflict between precise and fuzzy historians. In the first phase, in the nineteenth century, precise history, firmly based on documents, was defined, by Leopold von Ranke and the Rankeans, against an older fuzzy or “conjectural” (...) history. In a second phase, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new fuzzy history was defined against “positivist” history, by Karl Lamprecht in Germany, Lucien Febvre in France, and George Trevelyan in England, among others. In a third phase, in the middle of the twentieth century, practitioners of quantitative history (sometimes known as the New Economic History or more generally as “cliometrics”) condemned all nonquantitative historians as fuzzy. In a fourth phase, from the 1970s onward, a still newer fuzzy history, comprising historical anthropology, microhistory, and the New Cultural History, was defined against quantitative history by scholars such as Georges Duby in France, Carlo Ginzburg in Italy, and Robert Darnton in the United States. In short, there has been a gradual move from more or less unself-conscious imprecision to self-conscious antiprecision. (shrink)

[The French revolution in historiography].

One of the major intellectual debates at the beginning of the new century concerns the status of accounts of the past. Do historians discover or invent, construct or reconstruct the objects they study? The discussion has been particularly lively in France and in the USA, and it is therefore appropriate that a group of distinguished historians from Britain should now engage with this subject. These ten essays present a historical and critical overview of British historical thought and writing since 1900, (...) focusing on selected periods, regions, disciplines, and themes. This challenging volume will intrigue anyone interested in the process of history writing. (shrink)

This article discusses the similarities and differences between what might be called two »crises of historical consciousness« in the late 17th and the late 20th, the first engendered by a combination of philosophical scepticism with new techniques for questioning the credibility of historical sources and detecting forgeries, the second in our crisis. The result is a widespread cultural relativism to which the debates on colonialism and feminism as well as the practice of anthropology and literary theory have contributed. In both (...) periods, the debate about epistemology is linked to the opening of the frontier between history and fiction and the rise of a hybrid genre of historical novel/novelistic exemplified by St. Real and Defoe in the first crisis, and by Eco, Keneally and many others today. (shrink)