For the last hundred years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. So began Professor Bruce Gilley's watershed academic article The Case for Colonialism of 2017. The article sparked a global furor. Critics and defenders of Gilley's argument battled it out in the court of public opinion. The Times of London described Gilley as probably the academic most likely to be no-platformed in Britain. The New York Times called him one of the panicky white bros who proclaim ever more rowdily that the (white) West was, and is, best and are busy recyclers of Western supremacism. In this book, Gilley responds to the critics and elaborates on the case for colonialism. The critics have no evidence for their claims, he asserts. The case for colonialism is robust no matter which colonizer or colonized area one examines. Patient, empirical, humorous, and not a little exasperated by anti-colonial ideologues, Gilley here sets a challenge for the next generation of scholars of colonialism. It is time to make the case for colonialism again, he writes.

In recent years, from school board meetings to the halls of Congress, Americans have engaged in fierce debates about how slavery and its legacies ought to be taught, researched, and narrated. But since the earliest days of the Republic, political leaders, abolitionists, judges, scholars, and ordinary citizens have all struggled to explain and understand the peculiar institution.

In Making Sense of Slavery, historian Scott Spillman shows that the study of slavery was a vital catalyst for the broader development of American intellectual life and politics. In contexts ranging from the plantation fields to the university classroom, Americans interpreted slavery and its afterlives through many lenses, shaping the trajectory of disciplines from economics to sociology, from psychology to history. Spillman delves deeply into the archives, and into the pathbreaking work of scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Annette Gordon-Reed, to trace how generations of Americans have wrestled with the paradox of slavery in a country founded on principles of liberty and equality.

As the debate over the place of slavery in our history rages on, Making Sense of Slavery shows that what is truly central to American history is this very debate itself. 

Designed for the classroom, Thinking About History is organized around big questions: Whose history do we write, and how does that affect what stories get told and how they are told? How did we come to view the nation as the inevitable context for history, and what happens when we move outside those boundaries? What is the relation among popular, academic, and public history, and how should we evaluate sources? What is the difference between description and interpretation, and how do we balance them? Maza provides choice examples in place of definitive answers, and the result is a book that will spark classroom discussion and offer students a view of history as a vibrant, ever-changing field of inquiry that is thoroughly relevant to our daily lives.

Complete with practical advice and helpful guidance, this book is an approachable manual perfect for budding historians at all levels. Its worksheets, which focus on framing realistic goals and heading off common misunderstandings, will aid independent work and make check-ins with advisor more candid and productive. Drawing on examples from six continents, as well as primary sources ranging from cuneiform tablets to emails, students will learn about the effective deployment of quotations, footnotes, maps, graphs, images, and data visualizations. Throughout the book, emphasis is placed on how the student can formulate, support, and revise their claims in a historical project with a skeptical reader in mind.

The now-classic tale of a sixteenth-century miller facing the Roman Inquisition.

The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in.

For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a mysterious book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed--just as cheese is made out of milk--and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.

Ginzburg's influential book has been widely regarded as an early example of the analytic, case-oriented approach known as microhistory. In a thoughtful new preface, Ginzburg offers his own corollary to Menocchio's story as he considers the discrepancy between the intentions of the writer and what gets written. The Italian miller's story and Ginzburg's work continue to resonate with modern readers because they focus on how oral and written culture are inextricably linked. Menocchio's 500-year-old challenge to authority remains evocative and vital today.

The aim throughout History: A Very Short Introduction is to discuss theories of history in a general, pithy, and accessible manner, rather than delve into specific periods. This is a book that will appeal to all students and general readers with an interest in history or historiography.

About the Series:
Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

Using numerous examples from the works of cultural, political, and social historians, Writing History serves as an ideal text for any history course that asks students to conduct research. The sixth edition offers better guidance on how to begin a research paper and expanded sections on oral history and visual and material sources

Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and F lix Guattari, while engaging -- in an entirely unprecedented manner -- the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages.

De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West's history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter--energy itself.

A Swerve Edition.

There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as objective history? In this witty, wise, and elegant (The Spectator), book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other equally significant witnesses, such as the writers of the Bible, novelists, and political propagandists, influence what becomes the accepted record. Cohen argues, for example, that some historians are practitioners of Bad History and twist reality to glorify themselves or their country.

Scholarly, lively, quotable, up-to-date, and fun (Hilary Mantel, author of the bestselling Thomas Cromwell trilogy), Making History investigates the published works and private utterances of our greatest chroniclers to discover the agendas that informed their--and our--views of the world. From the origins of history writing, when such an activity itself seemed revolutionary, through to television and the digital age, Cohen brings captivating figures to vivid light, from Thucydides and Tacitus to Voltaire and Gibbon, Winston Churchill and Henry Louis Gates. Rich in complex truths and surprising anecdotes, the result is a revealing exploration of both the aims and art of history-making, one that will lead us to rethink how we learn about our past and about ourselves.

For the last hundred years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. So began Professor Bruce Gilley's watershed academic article The Case for Colonialism of 2017. The article sparked a global furor. Critics and defenders of Gilley's argument battled it out in the court of public opinion. The Times of London described Gilley as probably the academic most likely to be no-platformed in Britain. The New York Times called him one of the panicky white bros who proclaim ever more rowdily that the (white) West was, and is, best and are busy recyclers of Western supremacism. In this book, Gilley responds to the critics and elaborates on the case for colonialism. The critics have no evidence for their claims, he asserts. The case for colonialism is robust no matter which colonizer or colonized area one examines. Patient, empirical, humorous, and not a little exasperated by anti-colonial ideologues, Gilley here sets a challenge for the next generation of scholars of colonialism. It is time to make the case for colonialism again, he writes.

Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific and who isn't? This question too is one Gaddis explores, in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy.

Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of post-modernist claims that we can't know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.

From one of today's most innovative ancient historians, a provocative new vision of why ancient history matters--and why it needs to be told in a radically different, global way

It's easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history--obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction. In What Is Ancient History?, Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history--a global history that captures antiquity's pivotal role as a decisive phase in human development, one that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to shape our lives today.

For Scheidel, ancient history is when the earliest versions of today's ways of life were created and spread--from farming, mining, and engineering to housing and transportation, cities and government, writing and belief systems. Transforming the planet, this process unfolded all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, often at different times, sometimes haltingly but ultimately unstoppably. Yet it's rarely studied or taught that way. Since the eighteenth century, Western intellectuals have dismembered the ancient world, driven not only by their quest for professional expertise but also by nationalism, colonialism, racism, and the idealization of Greece and Rome. Specialized scholarship has fractured into numerous academic niches, obscuring broader patterns and dynamics and keeping us from understanding just how much humanity has long had in common.

The time has come, Scheidel argues, to put the ancient world back together--by moving beyond the limitations of Greco-Roman classics, by systematically comparing ancient societies, and by exploring early exchanges and connections between them. The time has come, in other words, for an ancient history for everyone.

A fully updated and revised edition of the book USA Today called jim-dandy pop history, by the bestselling, American Book Award-winning author

The most definitive and expansive work on the Lost Cause and the movement to whitewash history.
--Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans

From the author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, a completely updated--and more timely than ever--version of the myth-busting history book that focuses on the inaccuracies, myths, and lies on monuments, statues, national landmarks, and historical sites all across America.

In Lies Across America, James W. Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning Lies My Teacher Told Me, of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. This is a one-of-a-kind examination of historic sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. New changes and updates include:

- a town in Louisiana that was the site of a major but now-forgotten enslaved persons' uprising

- a totally revised tour of the memory and intentional forgetting of slavery and the Civil War in Richmond, Virginia

- the hideout of a gang in Delaware that made money by kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery

Entertaining and enlightening, Lies Across America also has a serious role to play in contemporary debates about white supremacy and Confederate memorials.

Balanced and fair-minded, the book covers the development of modern academic scholarship, but also helps students appreciate the contributions of popular historians and of the many forms of public history. Often drawing on what historians from Edward Gibbon to Natalie Zemon Davis have written about their own careers, From Herodotus to H-Net, Second Edition, brings the discipline of history alive for students and general readers.

Dive into the rich and captivating world of Norse mythology, history, and legendary kings with The Heimskringla, the iconic literary masterpiece by Snorri Sturluson. This timeless collection of sagas is a must-have for anyone fascinated by the heroic tales of the Viking Age.

Discover the Epic Sagas:

The Heimskringla is a comprehensive compilation of sagas that chronicle the lives and deeds of legendary Norse rulers, including the saga of the great King Olaf Tryggvason, King Olaf Haraldsson, and King Magnus the Good. Journey through the dramatic battles, alliances, and legendary feats that shaped the Viking world, from the heroic deeds of warriors to the rise and fall of kingdoms.

Snorri Sturluson's Masterful Prose:

Snorri Sturluson, one of Iceland's greatest medieval scholars and storytellers, weaves these sagas with a masterful blend of historical accounts and mythical elements. His vivid storytelling style brings to life the characters and events of the Viking Age, making The Heimskringla an engaging and immersive reading experience.

A Window into Viking Culture:

The Heimskringla not only offers thrilling narratives but also provides valuable insights into the social and cultural aspects of Viking society. Delve into the customs, traditions, and beliefs of the Norse people as you explore this treasure trove of sagas.

A Timeless Classic:

This edition of The Heimskringla is a faithful translation of Snorri Sturluson's original work, ensuring that the essence and authenticity of these sagas are preserved for modern readers. Whether you're a history enthusiast, a mythology buff, or simply looking for captivating tales of adventure, Heimskringla is a literary gem that promises hours of reading pleasure. Add this book to your collection and embark on a journey through the legendary sagas of the Viking Age.

This single edition is volume 2 of Henderson Publishing's Norse Literature Series. This book has been newly typeset. It is not a facsimile edition.

History, suggests Robert Gildea, is a battlefield. Questions of power, rights, identity and nationhood always have an ancient and modern historical dimension and countries still go to war over their interpretation of history. Yet accounts of history are just as prone to fabrication as fake news, so how can we tell good history from bad? How can history be critical, learning from the past and righting wrongs, rather than divisive, such as riding roughshod over the rights of others?

In this passionately argued book, Gildea suggests that the more people who really understand what good history entails, the more likely history is to triumph over myth. He sees positive signs in public history, citizen historians and community projects, among other developments. And he debunks claims that 'you cannot rewrite history', arguing that good history that's attuned to its times must be rewritten time and again.