Bringing together essays on uses of history as both a practical activity and an approach to thinking about the present, this collection explores ways in which people have reckoned with history in pasts both distant and near.
Reckoning with History begins by examining uses of the past in early modern Britain, a period in which print, religious reformation, and political conflict transformed historical culture. Later essays offer insights into personal, popular, professional, and sometimes deeply political uses of the past in other times and places, helping to contextualize our own moments in historical writing and to link the early and post-modern periods. Throughout, contributors respond to the writings of Daniel Woolf, whose scholarship illuminates the history of the historical discipline and the social circulation of the past.
Covering subjects such as early archival practices, memories of historic plagues, and the type of commemorations needed to revitalize liberal democracies, Reckoning with History contextualizes the uses of the past today.
Authors
Related Organizations
- Published in
- Montreal, CA
Table of Contents
- Cover 1
- RECKONING WITH HISTORY 2
- Title 4
- Copyright 5
- Contents 6
- Preface and Acknowledgments 8
- 1 Reckoning with the Past: An Appreciation and an Introduction 12
- 2 Historical Guidance for Early Modern English Women and Children 27
- 3 A Persian Mirror for English Magistrates: Thomas Preston’s Cambises and the Coming to Terms with the Marian Past 49
- 4 Reform and Conversion: Contextualizing Richard Stanihurst’s Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) 73
- 5 The Repertories of the Tower Records: William Bowyer’s Calendars of the English State Papers in the 1560s 96
- 6 Past Plagues and Their Uses in Early Modern England 122
- 7 “Women Worthies” in Eighteenth-Century Historical Culture: Sarah Chapone and George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752) 141
- 8 Abiel Holmes and George Chalmers: Plagiarism and Annals in the American Republic of Letters 164
- 9 William Crookes and the Imagined History of Thallium 189
- 10 The Jewish Holocaust, Indigenous People, and the Politics of Recognition: A Cautionary Tale 212
- 11 Engaging Right-Wing Populisms: Which Historical Memory for What Kind of Democracy? 237
- Contributors 258
- Index 262
