Why history? : a history / Donald Bloxham.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bloxham, Donald, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Historiography.

History--Philosophy.

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 396 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, England : Oxford University Press, 2020.

Summary:

What is the point of history? Why has the study of the past been so important for so long? 'Why History? A History' contemplates two and a half thousand years of historianship to establish how very different thinkers in diverse contexts have conceived their activities, and to illustrate the purposes that their historical investigations have served. Whether considering Herodotus, medieval religious exegesis, or twentieth-century cultural history, at the core of this work is the way that the present has been conceived to relate to the past. Alongside many changes in technique and philosophy, Donald Bloxham's book reveals striking long-term continuities in justifications for the discipline.

Contents:

On 'Modern Historical Consciousness'

Continuity and Change in Justifications for History

1: Classical History between Epic and Rhetoric

Introduction

Genealogy, Ethnography, and Historical Consciousness

Rhetoric, Purpose, Truth

Useful and Pleasurable History

From Greek to Roman Historiography

Philosophy, Poetry, History: A Greek in Rome

Roman Historiography in the Late Republic

History under Monarchy

Pre- and Anti-Christian Influences

2: History, Faith, Fortuna

Classical-Christian Fusion

Christianity and Judaism

Early Christian Historiography

Christian Philosophy of History

On Causation: Determinism and Human Agency

3: The 'Middle Age'

Annals and Ancestry

Exemplarity, Allegory, and the Presence of the Past

Periodization and the Conceptualization of Change

Theology, Religious Hermeneutics, and History as Communion

Socio-Economic Change and the Function of Genealogies

History and Developments in Political Identity

'Others' Present and Past

4: Renaissances and Reformations

Re-Encounters

Romans, Greeks, Goths

Developments in Source Criticism?

Changed Circumstances, Contested Purposes

The Return of Similitudo Temporum

Sixteenth-Century French Historiography

Modern Contextualization?

Montaigne

Church, State, and Historianship: A Comparative Perspective

Ecclesiastical History and Source Criticism

History in the Scientific Seventeenth Century

5: Society, Nature, Emancipation

Prelude: Bolingbroke and Vico

The French Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment

The German Enlightenment and Early Romanticism

Hegel

Marx

6: Nationalism, Historicism, Crisis

Nationalism, Romanticism, Whiggery

Historicism and Developmental Thought

Alternatives to the Dominant German Model in the 1860s

Reactions to Historicism

New Philosophies of Historical 'Neutrality' from the Later Nineteenth Century

'Progressive' History

The Decline of Historicism and the Rise of German Social History

7: Turns to the Present

Structures and Superstructures

Structures and Events

From Interwar to Post-War

Social History, Sociology, Modernization

Social History, Experience, Identity

Language and Culture

Theory and History

New New Histories

8: Justifying History Today

History as Speculative Philosophy

History as Method

Knowledge and Human Interests

History as Practical Lesson

History as Moral Lesson

History as Travel, History as Tolerance?

History as Therapy

Varieties of Emancipatory History

History as Emancipation III

History as Emancipation II

History as Emancipation I

History as Identity.

Notes:

Description based on print version record and online resource.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Print version: Why history?

ISBN:

0-19-260234-9

0-19-189084-7

0-19-260233-0