List of tables

Prologue: history matters

Acknowledgements

THEORY

Part 1 Perspectives

Chapter 1: Proof, objectivity and causality

1. History: science or art?
2. The status of historical knowledge
3. Evidence and interpretation
4. Causes in history

Chapter 2: Ordering of time

1. Time, history, modernity
2. Newton and the 'time reckoner'
3. Periodization
4. The shape of things to come

Part 2 Histories and Philosophies

Chapter 3: Ideas of History; from the ancients to the Christians

1. Herodotus and gold-digging ants
2. Thucydides and reason: an historian for our times?
3. What did the Romans ever do for history?
4. Christianity and the end of days

Chapter 4: From the Middle Ages to the Early Modern

1. European Christendom and the age of Bede
2. Peoples of the book: Jewish and Islamic conceptions of history
3. Renaissance humanism and rediscovery of the classics
4. The battle of books: Camden, Clarendon and English identity

Chapter 5: Enlightenment and Romanticism

1. The English Enlightenment?
2. Secular histories
3. Romanticism: Scott and Carlyle

Chapter 6: The English Tradition

1. Responses to the Enlightenment: Edmund Burke
2. Constitutionalism and the Whig interpretation of history
3. JH Plumb and the new Whigs

Chapter 7: The North American Tradition

1. America and the New Order of the Ages
2. The progressive or new historians
3. The consensus historians
4. The other America

Chapter 8: Histories of Revolutions; Revolutionary histories

1. Paine and the radical tradition
2. French and German Experiences
3. Germany, Hegel and the Spirit of History
4. Marx and 'historical materialism'
5. Marxism in the twentieth century

Chapter 9: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism

1. Modernity and the Enlightenment
2. Postmodernism
3. Postcolonialism and the West

METHOD

Part 3 Varieties

Chapter 10: Political History

1. Theories of the state
2. High and low politics: the case of the British Labour Party
3. Beyond state and party: political histories and civil society

Chapter 11: Economic History

1. Population and social change
2. Economic historians and the big historical questions
3. The business of business history

Chapter 12: Social History

1. The emergence of social history
2. Class and authority
3. The family in history

Chapter 13: Cultural History

1. What is cultural history?
2. The national character
3. The promise of cultural history: conflict and carnival

Chapter 14: Feminism, Gender and Women's History

1. Feminism and history
2. The attack on class
3. Gender and identity

Chapter 15: Public History

1. What is public about history?
2. Consumption of public history
3. Producing public history
4. Public history as contested knowledge

Chapter 16: Visual History

1. Visual histories
2. Ways of seeing: Paintings
3. Ways of seeing: Prints and photographs

Chapter 17: Global history

1. The challenges of global history
2. Origins of the global imagination
3. Enter 'new world history'

Chapter 18: Environmental history

1. The scope of environmental history
2. Historic precedents
3. European colonialism
4. Modern environmentalism

Part 4 History and Other Disciplines

Chapter 19: Archaeology

1. The lure of archaeology
2. The theoretical turn: Collingwood and Childe
3. Historical archaeology
4. Jerusalem and its layers

Chapter 20: Anthropology

1. Pens and pith helmets
2. Functionalism and structuralism
3. Historical myths: Jewish conspiracies and the 'blood libel'
4. The 'dying god': Captain Cook and ethnohistory
5. Microhistories: worms, night battles and ecstasies

Chapter 21: Literature

1. Literature as history
2. The new historicism: Text and context
3. The graphic novel
4. Writing the metropolis

Chapter 22: Geography

1. History, space and place
2. Geographies of empire
3. How to lie with maps

PRACTICE

Chapter 23: Archives in a Digital World

1. What is an archive?
2. 'When we return as human beings again': archives and the ashes
3. Speaking for ourselves: state and community archives
4. Archives and the digital turn

Chapter 24: Oral History

1. Anthropologists of ourselves
2. Oral historiographies
3. The limits of memory: Arthur Harding and the East End underworld
4. The wider experience

Bibliography

Index