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30 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 2 of 2

The Fabric of Historical Time

The Fabric of Historical Time
  • Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, Marek Tamm
  • Published online:
    28 July 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023
  • Historical time is a notoriously elusive notion. Yet, as societies attempt to make sense of rapidly changing worlds, it gains a new significance in the twenty-first century. This Element sketches a theory of historical time as based on a distinction between temporality and historicity. It approaches the fabric of historical time as varying relational arrangements and interactions of multiple temporalities and historicities. In the fabric, kinds of temporalities and historicities emerge, come to being, fade out, transform, cease to exist, merge, coexist, overlap, arrange and rearrange in constellations, and clash and conflict in a dynamic without a predetermined plot. The Element pays special attention to the more-than-human temporalities of the Anthropocene, the technology-fueled historicities of runaway changes, and the conflicts in the fabric of historical time at the intersections of technological, ecological, and social change.
Archaeology as History

Archaeology as History
  • Telling Stories from a Fragmented Past
  • Catherine J. Frieman
  • Published online:
    26 July 2023
    Print publication:
    24 August 2023
  • This Element volume focuses on how archaeologists construct narratives of past people and environments from the complex and fragmented archaeological record. In keeping with its position in a series of historiography, it considers how we make meaning from things and places, with an emphasis on changing practices over time and the questions archaeologists have and can ask of the archaeological record. It aims to provide readers with a reflexive and comprehensive overview of what it is that archaeologists do with the archaeological record, how that translates into specific stories or narratives about the past, and the limitations or advantages of these when trying to understand past worlds. The goal is to shift the reader's perspective of archaeology away from seeing it as a primarily data gathering field, to a clearer understanding of how archaeologists make and use the data they uncover.
A History of Big History

A History of Big History
  • Ian Hesketh
  • Published online:
    22 May 2023
    Print publication:
    15 June 2023
  • Big History is a seemingly novel approach that seeks to situate human history within a grand cosmic story of life. It claims to do so by uniting the historical sciences in order to construct a linear and accurate timeline of 'threshold moments' beginning with the Big Bang and ending with the present and future development of humanity itself. As well as examining the theory and practice of Big History, this Element considers Big History alongside previous largescale attempts to unite human and natural history, and includes comparative discussions of the practices of chronology, universal history, and the evolutionary epic.
Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data

Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data
  • Lessons from an Interdisciplinary Project
  • Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin, Mia Ridge, Giorgia Tolfo
  • Published online:
    26 January 2023
    Print publication:
    09 February 2023
    • Element
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      • Open access
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  • Living with Machines is the largest digital humanities project ever funded in the UK. The project brought together a team of twenty-three researchers to leverage more than twenty-years' worth of digitisation projects in order to deepen our understanding of the impact of mechanisation on nineteenth-century Britain. In contrast to many previous digital humanities projects which have sought to create resources, the project was concerned to work with what was already there, which whilst straightforward in theory is complex in practice. This Element describes the efforts to do so. It outlines the challenges of establishing and managing a truly multidisciplinary digital humanities project in the complex landscape of cultural data in the UK and share what other projects seeking to undertake digital history projects can learn from the experience. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Progress and the Scale of History

Progress and the Scale of History
  • Tyson Retz
  • Published online:
    10 October 2022
    Print publication:
    27 October 2022
  • The idea of progress is a product of historical thinking. It is a bold interpretation of history that combines understandings of the past, perceptions of the present and expectations of the future. This Element examines the shifting scale of this past, present and future configuration from antiquity to the present day. It develops five categories that reveal the conceptual features of progress together with the philosophies of history in which they have been enmeshed, from temporal outlooks that held no notion of progress to universal histories that viewed progress as a law of nature, from speculation on the meaning and direction of history to the total rejection of all historical constructions. Global in scope and conversant with present-day debates in the theory and philosophy of history, the argument throughout is that the scale on which we conceive history plays a determining role in how we think about progress.
Confronting Evil in History

Confronting Evil in History
  • Daniel Little
  • Published online:
    23 September 2022
    Print publication:
    13 October 2022
  • Evil is sometimes thought to be incomprehensible and abnormal, falling outside of familiar historical and human processes. And yet the twentieth century was replete with instances of cruelty on a massive scale, including systematic torture, murder, and enslavement of ordinary, innocent human beings. These overwhelming atrocities included genocide, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor. This Element underlines the importance of careful, truthful historical investigation of the complicated realities of dark periods in human history; the importance of understanding these events in terms that give attention to the human experience of the people who were subject to them and those who perpetrated them; the question of whether the idea of 'evil' helps us to confront these periods honestly; and the possibility of improving our civilization's resilience in the face of the impulses towards cruelty to other human beings that have so often emerged.
Historians' Virtues

Historians' Virtues
  • From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century
  • Herman Paul
  • Published online:
    09 September 2022
    Print publication:
    22 September 2022
    • Element
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      • Open access
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  • Why do historians so often talk about objectivity, empathy, and fair-mindedness? What roles do such personal qualities play in historical studies? And why does it make sense to call them virtues rather than skills or habits? Historians' Virtues is the first publication to explore these questions in some depth. With case studies from across the centuries, the Element identifies major discontinuities in how and why historians talked about the marks of a good scholar. At the same time, it draws attention to long-term legacies that last until today. Virtues were, and are, invoked in debates over the historian's task. They reveal how historians position themselves vis-à-vis political regimes, religious traditions, or neoliberal university systems. More importantly, they show that historical study not only requires knowledge and technical skills, but also makes demands on the character of its practitioners. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age

The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age
  • Ian Milligan
  • Published online:
    05 August 2022
    Print publication:
    18 August 2022
    • Element
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      • Open access
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  • Historians make research queries on Google, ProQuest, and the HathiTrust. They garner information from keyword searches, carried out across millions of documents, their research shaped by algorithms they rarely understand. Historians often then visit archives in whirlwind trips marked by thousands of digital photographs, subsequently explored on computer monitors from the comfort of their offices. They may then take to social media or other digital platforms, their work shaped through these new forms of pre- and post-publication review. Almost all aspects of the historian's research workflow have been transformed by digital technology. In other words, all historians – not just Digital Historians – are implicated in this shift. The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age equips historians to be self-conscious practitioners by making these shifts explicit and exploring their long-term impact. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
A History of Political Science

A History of Political Science
  • Mark Bevir
  • Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022
  • This Element denaturalises political science, stressing the contestability and contingency of ideas, traditions, subfields, and even the discipline itself. The history of political science is less one of scholars testing and improving theories by reference to data than of their appropriating and transforming ideas, often obscuring or obliterating former meanings, to serve new purposes in shifting political contexts. Political science arose in the late nineteenth century as part of a wider modernism that replaced earlier developmental narratives with more formal explanations. It changed as some scholars yoked together behavioural topics, quantitative techniques, and positivist theory, and as other scholars rejected their doing so. Subfields such as International Relations remained semi-detached and focused on policy as much as theory. Furthermore, the shifting fashions within political science – modernism, behaviouralism, realism, neoliberalism, the new institutionalism – have informed the policies by which governments have tried to tame contingency and govern people.
The Theory and Philosophy of History

The Theory and Philosophy of History
  • Global Variations
  • João Ohara
  • Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    18 August 2022
  • This Element argues for a broad and inclusive understanding of the 'theory and philosophy of history', a goal that has proven elusive. Different intellectual traditions have competing, often incompatible definitions of what could or should count as proper 'theory/philosophy of history'. By expanding on the traditional versions of the 'history of the theory and philosophy of history' and including contexts from the Global South, particularly Latin America, the author hopes to offer a broader, more inclusive perspective on the theoretical reflections about history.

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