Description
Historical Understanding: Past, Present, and Future, ISBN-13: 978-1350168619
[PDF eBook eTextbook]
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic (March 24, 2022)
- Language: English
- 320 pages
- ISBN-10: 1350168610
- ISBN-13: 978-1350168619
The first decades of the new century shake old certainties. In a whirlwind of profound changes, do we have more history or less? Does history overwhelm us in all domains of life or is historical understanding in yet another crisis? The answers do not come easily. The recent demise of humanities education, the technological alterations of our social lifeworlds and the human condition, the anthropogenic changes in the Earth system, the growing sense of memory, trauma and historical injustice as alternative approaches to the past, seem to entail contradictions and complexities that do not fit very well with our existing notions of historical understanding. Historical thought as we know it is facing manifold challenges, and we struggle to grasp a larger picture that could encompass them.
Boasting a range of contributions from leading scholars, this volume attempts just that. In an innovative collection of short essays, Historical Understanding explores the current shape of historical understanding today, by surveying a variety of historical relations to the past, present, and future in the face of socio-political, ecological and technological upheavals.
This book is an invaluable research tool for students and researchers alike, presenting a kaleidoscope-like overview of manifold new ways which we navigate “historically” in coping with present-day challenges, both in wider society and in historiography
Table of Contents:
Cover
Halftitle Page
Title Page
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION Historical understanding today
PART ONE The historical present
Historicities
1 The texture of the present
2 Framing the polychronic present
3 Caught between past and future: On the uses of temporal figurations for political exclusion
4 In sync/Out of sync
5 Favoring an offensive presentism
Histories
6 Infinite history
7 History of the present: Or, two approaches to causality and contingency
8 Theses on theory and history
9 Can historians be replaced by algorithms?
PART TWO History and the future
Historicities
10 Planetary futures, planetary history
11 Future-oriented history
12 What future for the future? Utopian lessons from a global pandemic
Histories
13 The future as a domain of historical inquiry
14 Periodization of the future
15 History and technology futures: Where history and technology assessment come together
16 Tomorrow is the Question: Modernity and the need for strong narratives about the future—and the past
PART THREE Relations to the past
Historicities
17 Probing the limits of a metaphor: On the stratigraphic model in history and geology
18 Against the historicist tradition of historical understanding
19 Historical understanding and reconciliation after violent conflict
20 The cross-cultural appeal of the “mirror” metaphor—History as practical past
Histories
21 Mouse-eaten records
22 Lines of sight: The historical certitude of digital reenactment
23 The DNA archive
24 Doing history and the pre-conceptual
CONCLUSION Historical understanding today: Incidental remarks
Index
Imprint
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is Research Fellow at Bielefeld University. He has been assistant professor at Leiden University and Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Zoltán’s recent work explores the challenges posed by technology and the Anthropocene to the human condition and modern historical thinking. He has published in journals ranging from History and Theory to The Anthropocene Review, and he is the author of History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2019) and The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Words (2020).
Lars Deile is Professor of Didactics and Theory of History at Bielefeld University. His work circles around intellectual and educational history, history didactics, history politics and theory of history. Currently he tries to bring such questions together in a theory of historical learning which is based on a phenomenological approach.
What makes us different?
• Instant Download
• Always Competitive Pricing
• 100% Privacy
• FREE Sample Available
• 24-7 LIVE Customer Support
